Episode 5: A Different Set of Rules

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Pushkin

previously on Hot Money.

I don't know, it's a kind of almost like a Sharon Stone moment from Basic Instinct, you know, the plot of Basic Instinct where she

murders her husband, but

that's also the plot of the book she's written, so it couldn't possibly be true.

Do you know about this

life-sized Trump figure in the office and his

martial office and his altar of Russian officers caps and

those heads, yeah?

I think the biggest tragedy of Jan Mazalek is

he probably could have earned millions, gazillions, with his charm and his wit and his business acumen and his skills that he didn't need to be

what he turned out to be.

This is Port-au-Cule, which is the kind of marina in the centre of Monaco, just below the ward of Monte Carlo.

The hills kind of rise up on either side around it.

The casino on the left, and on the right, up there, is the old town and the royal palace.

And all along the edges of the marina here are huge boats.

I'm in Monaco on the Cote d'Azur in the south of France yacht spotting with my former editor Paul Murphy.

Yeah that's a big one.

I know.

It's a big sub of these.

Yeah that that one's really that must be 60 meters or something.

Yeah well then look at this.

This one is a small cruise ship.

Paul covered finance in London for years and he knows this part of the world pretty well.

A sunny place for shady people.

You know, you come here because this is sort of a nowhere place in a way.

You know,

it's a fantasy world, a playground.

Well, there are specific reasons people do come here are there.

You know, there's tax.

Right.

Because there isn't any income tax.

Right.

There's security.

It's quite important.

Security because they won't be snooped on.

Or...

I don't think that's one aspect, but also just kind of old-fashioned, won't get robbed,

won't get kidnapped.

Yeah, I mean it's just a place where money talks, isn't it?

It's also been, in recent years, the place where wealthy Russians come to summer.

Even now, with most of the country's oligarchs under European sanctions, it's packed full of Russian visitors.

Not that you'd be able to tell that from the marina, where on a balmy June evening, super yacht after super yacht is lined up, getting hosed down by its crew.

Almost all of them are flying a Maltese flag, not because they're from Malta, but because you can register ownership of your yacht there anonymously.

This is a place where the super-rich can remain under the radar and live by their own rules.

Which might bring someone to mind.

You know, on the three occasions I had lunch with Jan Marslick in London, well, first two in London, the third one in Munich, he would always choose the most expensive lunching venue.

Marslech is attracted to kind of overt wealth, displays of overt wealth.

He clearly always liked to rub shoulders with the super rich, and this is a great place to do it, and as such, a natural place for Marslech to appear.

And before the collapse of Wirecard, Jan Marslek was here on the Coe d'Azur, often, socializing, carousing, and hanging out with lots of Russians.

There's one year during this period in his life that seems to have particular relevance: 2014.

The year Russia first invaded Ukraine, and the year some say a transformative thing happened to Marcelec down here in the sun.

The most significant and secretive thing that can happen in the life of a spy.

The moment he may have chosen to really dedicate himself to serving Russia's interests.

At the time, most Europeans were growing more afraid, more wary of Russia's intentions, more sceptical of the Kremlin's interest in peace.

But Marcelek, a young, talented and successful European businessman, went the other way.

I think some people end up spies, traitors, against their better interests.

They get tricked into serving someone else's cause.

Some spies get seduced into it, and some spies get blackmailed.

But some, they do it because they want to, because they believe in something, are loyal to something.

And they are the perfect spies.

I'm Sam Jones and from the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries, this is Hot Money, Agent of Chaos, Episode 5, A Different Set of Rules.

The most widely reported story of how Marslek was recruited by Russia is set just a few miles away from Monaco, in the port at Nice.

It's a moment that could reveal some clues as to why he chose his path.

So I went to see the spot.

I mean, we're standing just like meters from the stern of one of these yachts, and it could have just been one like this, where they would have just been sat there, you know, around a table having drinks or whatever, talking for Natalia's 30th birthday.

Natalia Zlobina, a glamorous woman Jan Marslek was dating, while also dating his long-term girlfriend in Munich.

Natalia is Russian.

There isn't too much information available about her.

Many of her records have been blanked from Russian state databases.

One thing I can say about her is that in her youth, she appeared in a schlocky, semi-pornographic lesbian vampire flick called Red Lips 2, Bloodlust.

And in this film, Natalia plays the role of a KGB assassin who murders her victims with a deadly nerve agent.

Which, apart from the murdering, is perhaps a particularly curious case of art prefiguring life, because by the time her 30th birthday rolled around, she had developed close connections to Russia's intelligence services.

It was a warm July evening in 2014.

A port camera captured Marcelek striding towards a mega-yacht, where he's greeted by Natalia before they climb on board to join a group of men.

We know all this thanks to an article from a consortium of journalists that was published in Germany's Des Spiegel and other outlets in 2024.

And although there are differing interpretations of what exactly happened, the setting and who was there are known thanks to that camera footage and from people who attended.

At this party, Natalia introduces Marcelek to a man named Stas.

Stas Pitlinski, a Russian military man who has connections to the GRU, Russian military intelligence, and the agency we understood Marcelec to be working with in Libya.

And what some reporters say happened is this.

On the yacht, Stas recruits Jan to work for Russian intelligence.

They quote a source who witnessed the early days of Marcelec's friendship with Stas.

They say, you can see Marcelek from two perspectives.

Marcelec before Stas and Marcelek after Stas.

This possible moment of Marcellek's recruitment is fascinating to me, partly because it's a story we've all heard a version of before.

It's that old tale of doing a deal with dark forces.

The Faust legend, a fable that's been told over and over again in different forms.

That's one reason why recruitment has this mythology around it.

But actually, it's a little unhelpful to consider it as just a handshake with the devil, because recruitment almost never happens in a single moment.

It's a process.

I needed to speak to someone who could tell me more about how that works and understand the significance of this moment in Nice.

Because we know already that Marcelec did say yes.

What we still don't know is why.

Hi Boris.

Hi.

Hello Sam.

This is Boris, Boris Volodyarski.

Today, he's a historian specializing in Cold War spying and a filmmaker.

Everything went well with the filming?

Absolutely, absolutely.

We're finishing, but still working hard day and night.

He's 70 and has a mildly exaggerated anglophile pose to his dress, low ties and waistcoats and umbrellas and so on.

Boris's film is a semi-dramatized documentary.

It's called Spy Capital 2 and it's all about Jan Marcelek.

So, like me, Boris has been spending a lot of time trying to get into Marcelek's head.

But I'm not actually interested in speaking to Boris just because of this film.

I'm interested because Boris is himself a former Russian intelligence officer.

It's very simple concerning my rather short participation with the Russian Special Forces, which I was in the office of Spetsnaz, what is called normally in the West Sleeper Agent.

So, if anyone is going to be able to credibly interpret Marcelek's recruitment, perhaps it's Boris.

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In the 1980s, Boris was fresh out of university with a bevy of European languages under his belt.

That's when he was drawn into an elite cadre of 300 Russian special agents whose mission was to infiltrate European states and wait for an expected war between the USSR and the West.

Do you know where they would have sent you?

Was it Germany or Austria?

Did they disclose that?

Oh, yes, I know definitely.

The first destination should have been Germany, and we studied Germany in every detail.

And from Germany, after a couple of years in Germany, it was to be a transfer to England.

Boris spent six years training for this mission.

He was turned into a lethal secret machine.

There were very interesting linguistic exercises, psychological linguistics, practical linguistics, phonetics and other things, underwater diving, mountaineering, parachuting, martial arts, all those sorts of things.

We were to handle all sorts of handguns, submachine guns, pistols, all that sort of things.

That was interesting.

This is a bit of a funny question, but did you believe in what you were being trained to do?

What was your sense of loyalty like?

Was it to Russia?

Did you believe in the purpose of what was going on?

It was much less a kind of ideology of propaganda, but more of

fun and interest in what you were going through and how you were trained.

Boris didn't recruit new agents, but he did know a lot about how the GRU worked.

So I asked Boris: how would the GRU go about recruiting someone like Jan Maselek?

There's a long

check, there's a so-called development of the target in order to know him better, to know whether he is inclined in this or that way to collaborate with the Foreign Intelligence Service, whether he is inclined to provide information that is needed from him.

And if

Moscow decides, and it is always Moscow who decides, if Moscow decides that this person can be and should be recruited, then they work out ways of how to recruit this person.

So initially, you'd have someone that would identify a potential target, and then you'd have a period of development where you would watch them, maybe test them a little bit, sort of introduce figures into their life, see how they respond, see if they're suitable as an agent to recruit.

That's correct, yes, and even in the so-called easy cases that might go on for three months, six months, for a year or even longer.

Right.

And what kind of things would a GRU officer be looking for?

I mean psychologically, what kind of person or profile might they see as somebody that's vulnerable to recruitment?

A person that should be judged vulnerable for recruitment is somebody who has something negative, like he is very much interested in money, in women, in getting promotion, in getting business, somebody who is interested in something.

And of course, that kind of weakness isn't only found in greedy businessmen.

If we are talking about recruiting a journalist, for example, It would be somebody who would get access, suddenly get access to information sensitive inside information, would be admitted, for example, to some Kremlin's briefings or get access to some persons within the Kremlin's administration who might share something.

Now I can't be certain but I'm pretty sure that when I used to cover defense for the FT, this kind of thing happened to me a couple of times.

I got offered access that seemed too good to be true, though not with the Russians, and to be clear, I wasn't recruited.

And maybe I was just being hyper-vigilant.

But even at the time, I remember thinking, something felt slightly off.

And it reminds me a little bit, too, of Marcelek giving Paul the Novichok document.

One way I see that is as an enticement, a suggestion that if Paul played ball, there might be more juicy information to come.

When I think about Marslek in Nice, I can tick off a lot of the factors that Boris mentions.

By 2014, he'd been travelling to Russia for years, so he was almost certainly on the radar of Russian intelligence.

He was evidently interested in money, his whole lifestyle was fuelled by it.

He had a weakness for attractive women, and of course, he had another big weakness too.

He was a fraudster.

So, one way you could interpret that day is like this: here was Jan Marcelek, by this point already secretly breaking the law, partying on a yacht with a Russian femmefatale who wasn't his long-term girlfriend.

A perfect set of opportunities for blackmail.

And yet, Boris believes that there's much more to it.

Boris says he has directly spoken with Stas Podlinski, the supposed GRU agent who was on the yacht.

We haven't been able to get in contact with him ourselves.

Boris says Stas is in Moscow and keeping a low profile.

He says Stas probably spoke to him so freely because they're both Russians and both from an intelligence world.

And Stas told him he didn't recruit Marcelek.

He had never recruited Marsalek as presented in

the media, in most of the newspapers, because this was not his job.

So just to be clear, Boris, you had a long conversation with Stas

by phone.

You reached him in Moscow, and based on that,

you're very clear that he is not a person who could have performed that function of being a recruiter.

Absolutely no way.

Absolutely in no way.

A recruiter is a very specific job.

And if we were talking about somebody who would be sent to recruit a person like Marsalik, that would be a specially trained recruiter, but that definitely don't happen.

So we are absolutely sure that Putlinski did not recruit Mursalik.

I have some questions about Boris's conversation with Stas.

I think any intelligence officer would deny recruiting an asset.

And I wonder if Boris's view of recruitment is perhaps a bit outdated, based on his own experience from his time in the GIU in the 1980s.

Because as I understand Russia's modern intelligence agencies, their activities can be much less formalised, much less constrained in who they engage with to work for them.

I'm also thinking Boris is a trained undercover intelligence officer, formerly of the same service Marcelek is alleged to work for.

To play devil's advocate, I suppose people might say, well, you know, you're Boris, you're a former GRU officer.

Maybe you're just saying that because that's what the Kremlin wants you to say to minimise this scandal.

What's your response to that?

I'm response to that that I have not been a GIU officer in the past 30 years.

On the contrary, I am an intelligence historian who is writing books that are very, very much unliked in Russia.

I am doing investigations.

I am identifying Russian agents.

I am identifying

in my books how Russian intelligence services work.

I show their weak parts, I show their strong parts, I explain how the structure operates.

I am giving plenty of interviews, writing plenty of articles myself, doing films that, of course, are very much

negatively viewed

by Moscow, by the Kremlin.

So no way that I have been collaborating with them

since I left the country voluntarily more than 30 years ago.

That's fair, I think.

Although it does strike me that his answer sounds like it could be a little bit rehearsed.

But then he's probably been asked this question before.

Setting these doubts aside, I'm still intrigued by the thrust of what Boris is telling me.

To be clear, Boris isn't saying Marcelek didn't work for the Russians, he's just saying it's more complicated than that.

Boris's interpretation is that Marcelek is not an agent, but what he describes as a collaborator, a kind of top-tier freelancer.

private business intelligence organization to do jobs that he thought would be interesting for him and for the Russians, because he was quite obviously pitching this or that kind of operation to the Russians and the Russians said, yes, we might be interested or no, this is not interested for us at the moment.

I think there's something in this idea.

I don't get the impression that Marcelik is just someone taking orders from the Russians.

I think he has his own agency in all of this.

There are tantalizing digital traces of Stas and Jan's friendship over the years.

One I've got in my mind in particular sticks out.

It's a picture from a birthday party, Stas's, I think.

He's got a cake in front of him, a huge grin on his face, empty wine glasses dot the table, and Jan is sat right next to him, leaning towards him.

There's an intimacy to it.

This doesn't seem like the kind of relationship you'd have with someone who has blackmailed you, or coerced you in some other way.

So I ask Boris, if Marcelek is a freelancer, why might he have wanted to work with Stas, with Russia?

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.

And if he were offered an offer whether to offer his services to the British intelligence or to the Russian intelligence, he psychologically, politically and ideologically would probably choose Russia rather than Britain.

Why do you think that is?

He was a free, truly free man in Russia, or at least that's what he thought he was or he is in Russia while he was there.

It's not freedom as we understand it.

They're thinking that living in Moscow, in Moscow specifically, not in Russia, in Moscow, they live in an absolutely free society.

They do what they want.

It's a sort of freedom of privilege.

It's a freedom to...

break a few rules and not be put in jail.

Absolutely.

Absolutely correct.

Absolutely correct.

And specifically, when you collaborate with intelligence services, you understand that you belong to the elite of the society.

You can do what you want, and nobody can do anything against you.

Mulling over what Boris has said, the Zil lanes in Moscow come to mind.

They're segregated lanes in Moscow's big arterial roads, reserved for the use of the nomenklatura, the most important people in the ruling administration.

They're a symbol of what being in the intelligence and government elite in Russia means.

A different set of rules.

Russia is still a kind of feudal society where power doesn't flow evenly.

It coalesces around people, not institutions, or laws.

And I think that's the point to grasp.

Marcelec had always operated by different rules, his own, where he could.

Rules that don't constrain his image of self, his freedom and ambition.

All of this reminds me of what I heard from Marcelec's old classmates in Kloster Neuburg.

Sat in school in the library, in front of that computer whenever he could be there, excusing himself from lessons others had to sit through, maybe because he was already more capable.

There's a big gap between leaving home in 1998 and fleeing to Moscow in 2020 as a fugitive, though.

22 years and a big psychological jump.

Because many of us have become more afraid of Russia in this period.

Convinced of its malign intentions, unsettled by its persecution of dissidents at home, its throttling of democracy, and its hatred of liberal values like sexual tolerance and its actual warmongering.

For a long time, I struggled to understand how Marcellek could have been drawn to all of that.

That is, until someone got in touch, someone who opened up a whole new perspective on where Marcellek's affinity for Russia might have come from.

I was struck because there was one dimension missing here.

That's coming up after the break.

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After the FT first outed Marcelec as a Russian asset, I got an interesting email from an Austrian historian.

Thomas Riegler.

Thomas wrote to say he'd found an element of the Marcelek story that no one else had noticed so far.

Everybody was like reporting, okay, Jan Marshalik is so fond of James Bond.

Jan Marshalik

likes military stuff and everything, and he really enjoys being an operative in this secret struggle.

Where does that come from?

And here I think this personal history comes into play.

Thomas's passion is spending time in the archives, researching spying, a subject close to him because it dominates the history of the city and the country he lives in.

There was always

this topic of Vienna being a spy capital, but nobody actually

could say what that meant.

And so my research was always to get to the bottom of this.

Why is actually Vienna being referred to as a spy capital?

In Austria, spying is basically legal, as long as you're not doing it against the Austrian state itself.

Since its independence, Austria has considered itself a neutral country.

A huge debate still rages about what that actually means, but one thing it's led to is Austria applying an extremely light touch when policing the activities of other powers on its own soil.

It's exactly for that reason that there are so many spies in Vienna, because it's the safest city in Europe for them to operate in.

And there are a lot, particularly Russian ones.

That's also partly because of where it is.

Vienna is in the very center of Europe.

Atlantic countries, the core of that idea we call the West, sometimes have a bit of a mental block in grasping this.

Austria tends to intuitively get labelled as a kind of mini-Germany, but Vienna, the city that invented the croissant, is closer to Ukraine than it is to France.

During the Cold War, politically, Austria might have been relegated to the minor league, but under the surface, Vienna actually became a new center of the great hidden geopolitical games of the time.

And for Russia in particular, it was a crucial window into the West.

It's kind of a launching pad for operations beyond the Iron Curtain.

This is like a logistical hub

where you can move people between those blocks.

It's the Vienna of Graham Greene's The Third Man, a city of divided loyalties.

And this is the world that Jan's grandfather operated into.

His grandfather, Hans Marshallach,

is

a very prominent figure.

in Austria because he survived a term in the concentration camp at Mathausen.

He was was in the resistance against the Nazi regime.

And he was kind of the first ones actually who put together a remembrance culture in Austria.

In his youth, Hans Marcelek was a communist.

That's not exactly unusual.

In this era, joining the communists was one of the most effective ways you could stand up to Nazism.

After the Second World War ended, he helped to establish the Malthausen Memorial Museum, and he took on a senior position in the Vienna State Police.

He was soon involved with counterintelligence on behalf of the Austrian state.

But when Thomas started digging into Jan's grandfather's history in the Austrian state archives, he found something else.

I came across a line in a book where the author stated that one of the key subordinates of the first Vienna state police chief was this Hans Marshalik.

And then I thought, okay, I might try my luck and get to the archives and ask if there is a dossier on Hans Marshalek.

And I, from my personal experience, I was very low-key in expectations.

And then when I got the material, to my great surprise, I must say, there was this

document laying out the case against Hans Marshalek.

Thomas still has the records and he's brought them out to show me.

And it's, yeah, it's one,

two, three pages.

And

is that like a bilager, an extra?

Yeah, it's five pages,

three-page letter, and then a sort of a little appendix of detail.

This document, it's a declassified political police file from 1956.

Basically, laying out the

Dringen der Verdach, the urgent suspicion

that Marcelek has betrayed his duties in the police and to the state of Austria and has informed or given information to the Russians.

It shows that Hans Marcelek was suspected of giving information about four people, members of German counterintelligence and a CIA informer, to the Soviets.

And those people were subsequently abducted and sent to a gulag.

Thomas had found that Hans Marcelek, Jan's grandfather, was under suspicion of being a Russian spy.

Jan's grandfather died in 2011 when Jan was 31.

Thomas believed that Hans must have loomed large in Jan's life.

Of course, this rich personal history this man had must have had

an influence on Jan Marshalik, especially when it comes to his fascination with the secret world.

We can't know, but for me it's a powerful idea that this man, who we can reasonably say was someone of great charisma, a leader and a figurehead, might have exerted some kind of pull on Jan.

Jan was, after all, largely alienated from his parents, his father who had left him as a kid and his mother, who he was estranged from.

I'm only really just digesting all of this when Thomas tells me something else.

He also has information about Stas Petlinski, the Russian associated with the GRU, the guy on the yacht.

His own grandfather was a KGB officer stationed in Vienna.

We don't have exact proof for that, but it looks like it is the case.

The grandfather of this Russian operative

was stationed in Vienna and that he most likely met with Hans Marsalek.

and that he cultivated him as a source.

Thomas is saying that not only was Jan Marcelek's grandfather Hans likely a Russian spy, but that also Stas' grandfather was a Soviet intelligence officer based in Vienna too.

And Thomas feels that he would have very likely come into contact with Jan's grandfather and may even have recruited him.

This is based on his knowledge of how Russia's intelligence agencies were operating in Vienna at this time.

Which is, that's just a remarkable historical coincidence, isn't it?

Or is it is it more than a coincidence?

Do these kind of things only happen because they're almost meant to happen?

Yeah,

it looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story here, because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.

And

maybe

that's just a speculation.

There was some sort of initiation going on here.

like an introduction was made.

I mean, is that

not too fanciful?

It's not unthinkable.

I mean, at this point, it's just pure speculation.

But you have to remember that the way Russian intelligence works, trust is built upon such introductions.

It's hard to weigh the significance of all this, because ultimately I can't tell you what Jan Marcelek did or didn't know about his grandfather's past, nor what the Russians knew about it.

But I do know that Russia's intelligence services have long institutional memories.

They They pay very close attention to their own archives.

All Russian intelligence officers, they spend years learning about past successes and failures as part of their training.

Either way, as Thomas shared all this with me, I realised I had been thinking of grandson Jan and Grandfather Hans as inhabiting radically different worlds.

After all, Hans lived through the Cold War, whereas Jan I had thought of him as someone largely motivated by money and glamour in a post ideological age.

But I'm starting to see another side of things, and Thomas does too.

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.

And this is a dangerous situation because those spies tend to be the better ones, better than the guys who do it solely for money.

How would you describe this new ideological fault line?

What is it?

I would say, of course, Russia is not the Soviet Union, but

it's mostly like a pan-slavistic, imperialistic outlook.

But it's also very much set against liberalism, against the West in general terms.

And people are choosing their sides in this struggle.

Maybe ideology is a bit of a misnomer.

I think the German word Weltanschauung is kind of better here.

It means worldview.

The subtle difference being that Weltanschauung is not so much about political theory as it is about behavior.

This anti-liberal order that Putin stands for, and that Russia in some way represents, It's easy to write that off as evil, but that's not necessarily where it comes from.

It's really about the fact that Putin and others believe the post-war legal ordering of the world is a failure, that liberalism is just a costume worn by the West to make us feel good about ourselves, and that the best way to stand up for national interests, and ultimately for a more peaceful world, is strength, authoritarianism.

It's a worldview partly conditioned by Soviet thinking too, that war and peace don't really exist, everything instead is just constant struggle.

And maybe on an individual level, for Marcelek, it sort of fits with this idea that laws, rules, corporate accounting practices, they're there to be broken if needed.

This kind of worldview, it's not really an ideology someone can learn in a book or from a political speech.

It's something you feel, pick up over time.

It's something that inspires you to act.

Coming up next time on Hot Money.

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 case?

Actually, now this sort of shows that they both have a common, you know, employer, which is Jan Marcel.

They were all plotting together.

Exactly.

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?

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

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