42. Putin’s Minions: The Master in Moscow (Ep 2)

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Can we use this IMSI catcher in Germany?

We need to spawn Ukrainians at a German military base.

Sure, we can.

Both are sitting and gathering dust in my Indiana Jones garage.

Do you have a qualified minion?

One, yes.

Only one?

A new task currently under development.

Go on a tour in Germany for one or two days.

There has to be observation made for the entrance to a training regiment for Ukrainian soldiers.

Welcome to the Rest is Classified.

I'm David McCloskey.

And I'm Gordon Garrera.

And And that was not us reading chat GPT prompts in strange accents.

That was, in fact, a series of messages exchanged between a very mysterious handler in Russia and the leader of a Bulgarian spy ring in London, a group that's just been convicted and whose story we're looking at in this closing episode, part two

of the Minions Spy Ring.

And Gordon, last time we looked at how this group of minions, this kind of weird, I guess almost slow horses-like story of this Bulgarian spy ring that's being run out of a guest house at the, you know, wonderfully beautiful Norfolk Beach up on the British coast.

There's a six-person group, many of whom are sleeping with each other and all of whom have very strange sort of nicknames and jobs.

And they've all been carrying out surveillance on opponents of the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin.

They had been hatching this plot to spy on Ukrainians that were training at a U.S.

military base on an air defense system.

And the group, they've been very active carrying out these surveillance operations.

And this time, we are going to finally get to the identity of this mysterious handler in Russia.

Yes, who you read with a...

brilliant accent, which might become more explicable when we get to it.

It's a hidden accent.

It's brilliantly done, David.

I thought really, really, really like a true novelist.

That's right.

I'm playing 3D chess here.

I'm playing 3D chess here.

So last time we saw how on February 8th, 2023, this group was busted by the police in Britain.

A series of coordinated arrests, that 33-room Great Yarmouth Hotel was being raided, as well as some of the flats in London.

And it is staggering what they find.

It was an Aladdin's cave of kind of spike it.

And I'm going to be interested to see what you make of it in a minute.

but let me just quickly run through what's there.

221 mobile phones.

I mean, that's more than most people.

258 hard drives, 495 SIM cards, 33 audio recording devices, 55 visual recording devices, 11 drones, 16 radios.

Now, I mean, that's a lot.

We should first of all say.

No piranha guns, no squid launchers, no cheese rays.

Those are these minions reference.

Those are minions references.

I told you, I sort of previewed, I think, in the first episode that I had gone deep into minions, wikis, and fandom, and I have compiled a list, which I am looking at right now, of different minions, sort of spy kit.

So I'm displeased that the actual Bulgarian minions did not have any of this stuff.

They did have some interesting stuff.

They had covert surveillance devices, which are kind of hidden in everyday objects.

So, for instance, there's one in a Coke bottle where there's a kind of hidden camera in the Coke bottle.

There's hidden cameras in rocks, lighters, car keys.

Some of them have got SIM cards attached to them so that they can live stream the video.

They had some sunglasses or glasses, which were capable of recording.

Gabarova, who you'll remember from our first episode, is the beautician from Acton.

She seems to have accidentally taken her own picture at one point in a mirror with the glasses, which is not top tray craft.

Ev submitted as evidence.

Yeah, exactly.

They find listening devices inside computer mouses, in smoke detectors, in a coat hook.

It's going to get people paranoid about what's in their houses now.

Everyone's going to be kind of checking it.

Even in jewelry.

I mean,

in jewelry.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They've got computer network exploitation devices, as they're described, with names such as pineapples, coconuts, turtles, bash bunnies, rubber duckies, packet squirrels, key crocs, plunderbugs, and sharkjacks.

I mean, who comes up with that stuff?

If any plunderbug manufacturers are out there, we are seeking sponsorship.

Having lost our sponsorship from the Norfolk Tourism Board,

you know, that went up in flames in episode one.

So Wonderbug manufacturers, please reach out.

The rest is classified.

Or shark jacks.

All shark jack tools.

Shark jacks.

Packet lab.

Packet squirrels.

Yeah.

All of these are basically intended to intercept communications on a insecure Wi-Fi network, right?

Exactly.

To gather information from Wi-Fi networks.

They've got car key cloning devices, GPS trackers with magnets.

They've got radio frequency identification, cloning equipment.

They've also got things which could clone the access cards for hotels and buildings, night vision binoculars, scanners, jammers, earpieces, you know, the type you see the kind of Secret Service wearing.

Anti-gravity serum?

No.

Oh, wait, hold on.

Oh, minions.

That's on my Nefario list.

I'm sorry.

I was across.

I crossed the stream.

If they could have had it, they would have had it, I think.

They would have

also fake ID card printers and fake IDs, 75 passports.

I like the fact they had fake press credentials, trying to pose as journalists, including credentials for the U.S.

Discovery and National Geographic channels.

Also, branded clothing.

They had lots of like branded clothing, like DHL and Deliveroo uniforms.

So you can pose as drivers.

So it sounds like a ton of stuff, but come on, David.

You're the former spy.

How good is this stuff?

Is this like dressing up box for CIA people or is this like amateur hour?

I have friends who were in the business for a very long time in kind of the tech side, and what they would say is

it used to be the case that to run, really, let's use this as an example, right?

To run a proper surveillance operation in a professional manner, you needed a few million dollars and the DST, right?

The Directorate of Science and Technology at the CIA that's making all this tech, right?

Now you need a few hundred bucks in Best Buy, right?

Electronic, a big box.

Do you not have Best Buys?

No, we don't.

Okay.

All right.

Electronic store, isn't it?

Consumer electronic.

A big electronic store.

Yeah, consumer electronic store.

So it's speaking to something true, which is I think the gap between

what spy agencies are using and what's commercially available has kind of narrowed.

It's not closed entirely because there's still

probably a tremendous amount of tech and particular capabilities that are still inside government exclusively and off the private market.

But I think that gap's narrowed.

And I think many capabilities that previously were only in the hands of governments and spy agencies are now out in the wild and have been commercialized.

And the reality is this like long list that you just went through, I think this shows a level of seriousness and commitment to the work of a surveillance.

I mean, they have a big tool shed of anything they might need to keep tabs on a target, right?

And keep in mind, almost all of the people they're surveilling, let's put aside the Ukrainians at the base for a second, but all the other people they're surveilling, kind of private citizens.

And so they're not going after professional intelligence officers.

They're watching people.

I mean, Christo Grozev, I'm sure, has some sense of tradecraft because he knows Putin's got a mark on him.

But again, he's not working for spy agency.

So I think what they have here is

probably an effective kit for a lot of the sort of operations that they've been given from this shadowy handler in Moscow.

Yeah, that makes sense, doesn't it?

It's good enough for what they need to do, which is spy on ordinary people and gather information about them.

It's amazing this stuff is commercially available.

I mean, there are shops you can buy it online.

I mean, it's often sold as for people who want to kind of keep track on their spouse or something like that.

But you kind of go, it's pretty dark stuff that you can buy all this spy kit and use it.

The MC grabber we talked about last time is more or less in the realm of like law enforcement in most countries and is very expensive.

So they're operating with pretty sophisticated kit.

I mean, I'm joking about Best Buy, you know, but I mean, they couldn't buy all of this at Best Buy.

I mean, they're getting this through connections in Russia.

That's exactly right.

That the MC grabber, the MC catcher, which they were going to use to capture and to kind of identify Ukrainian service personnel in Stuttgart, that is something which isn't commercially available.

That is the one bit which is really high-end and it's not quite clear where they got it from, but you can take a guess.

But just one more detail, because you'll remember with all our minions references, they were described as the minions by Rusev, the spiring boss from Great Yarmouth, to Moscow, and Minion was attached to one of the numbers of the people in the phones.

But also one important detail, in Ivanova's flat, they find a surveillance camera hidden inside a 20 centimeter minion soft toy.

And so we do, there is a picture of that.

And it's got a, I mean, it's, it's so, I find it kind of sad that a lovely thing like a minion has been subverted into a

tool of spy.

Of Putin's Russia.

Of Putin's Russia.

I mean, it's nothing sacred in this world that even the minions are being used by Putin spies.

Seeing this picture of this minion, this minion spy camera, it did make me.

wonder, did it come out that that was deployed operationally?

Because

I don't see a lot of uses for this, but maybe I'm not using my

full imagination.

Because you'd have to kind of hold it in front of someone to be used as a spy camera.

I don't know.

I mean, based off of the mugshots that I've seen of all these Bulgarians, I don't this minion

plush toy isn't really fitting with, you know, any of these people are not going to be carrying these around.

So I don't know.

I think this is, this is a case where, like in the MK Ultra episodes that we did on CI Mind Control and Sydney Gottlieb, there was a lot of tech in there that kind of seemed like a bunch of people kind of just having fun and doing crazy things because they could.

And the Minion plush toy with the camera in it kind of seems like they had six martinis up there in Norfolk and just decided to put a camera in a minion toy.

So they're finding a lot of this stuff, not all of it, but a lot of it in this kind of Great Yarmouth former hotel, which when you see the pictures of it, I mean, it is like a kind of, it looks more like a junk shop, like a junkyard, just boxes and stuff just littering the place.

Really messy.

As we said, not really a Indiana Jones warehouse.

But also, crucially, the police are able to recover 200,000 messages which were sent on the telegram communications network but they find all these messages they haven't been encrypted or the devices are open which is a bit

poor it seems like an oversight it seems like yeah it's a good it's going to prove to be a very poor move by the minions and their bosses because amongst other things there are close to 80 000 messages between rusev the great yarmuth dr nefario is it dr nefario mr nefario whatever it is dr nefario

yeah give him his duty i don't know where that's another piece of trivia that I don't have is where he received his doctorate.

I don't think he's a medical doctor.

I believe he has a PhD, but I don't know where, like what institutional doctors.

Again,

maybe we're going too much down the minions sidetrack, but that's okay.

But there's 80,000 messages between him and a man who uses the pseudonym Rupert Tiz.

And now this is the

name.

I don't know.

T-I-C-Z

Tix.

Maybe Ticks.

Ticks.

It's a weird Rupert Ticks.

But it turns out, now this is clear from the messages.

This is the man sending the orders from Russia.

But

here's the plot twist.

He's not Russian.

My accent from the beginning.

Your accent at the beginning was the giveaway.

He is an Austrian businessman, Jan Marcelek.

Now, this is where I think the story takes a particularly crazy turn.

This is the point.

It gets crazy.

It gets even crazier at this point.

Because this is not just some random low-level businessman.

This is an incredibly famous Austrian businessman in his time who'd been chief operating officer of a company called Wirecard, which was a major fintech champion in Germany, like a huge German tech success story.

When Germany was thinking, like, what champions do we have in the tech sector?

If you'd asked them five, ten years ago, they'd have said Wirecard is the story.

It's like a payments processor company based in Munich.

And he is the chief operating officer for it.

I mean, it's insane.

It's crazy.

I mean, so he is a strange character.

It's clear he had fingers in lots of pies, politics, business, and we learn later, spying.

So he's running a fintech business while also trying to recruit militias to control borders in Libya.

I mean, that's kind of unusual.

He lives in this palatial villa in Munich, opposite the Russian consulate, and he's involved in the Austrian-Russian Friendship Society.

Hmm.

I mean, you know.

He likes Russia.

Yeah.

So all is going well at Wildcard.

It's this big champion until a brilliant Financial Times investigation raises questions about its finances.

Now, the journalists who did this, I mean, it's an amazing story, because they start questioning whether there's something fishy around Wirecard, and then the pressure on the Financial Times is enormous.

And there's surveillance and there's pressure on the editor to try and kind of deal with this investigation clearly because they know that they're going to find something.

And in the end, it turns out that, you know, more than a billion euros is basically missing from the company and the whole thing is going to go under.

But before he can be arrested, and some of the others involved, some of the other executives executives are arrested jan marcelek does a runner which is a technical term he claims he's going to the philippines and he leaves a trail of messages to make it look like he's in asia but that looks like a red herring because he does a kind of spy style escape to belarus on a private jet and then ends up in moscow now here's the great detail that route of how he got out is tracked and revealed by none other than Christo Grozev of Bellingcat, who, as we learned last time, is one of the people the minions are tracking.

But now, you know, this businessman, he's a fugitive, Jan Marcelek, he's in Russia.

Looks like he gets a new identity at some point of a Russian priest who looks like him.

He's very well-bearded in the recent sort of wanted posters.

Yeah, which you can find.

And it also becomes clear, as all of this kind of unravels, that it looks like he's been in bed with Russian intelligence for a number of years.

He's visited Russia 60 times in the previous 10 years before he flees there using different documents, a mysterious diplomatic passport, thought to have been recruited by Russian military intelligence, the GRU, or GRU, to keep our millions.

Yes.

I mean, that's just slightly weird.

Reference around 2014.

According to Des Spiegel, the German news magazine, that might have been after he was targeted by a Russian woman in a honey trap who becomes his girlfriend and then connects him to Russian intelligence.

It's been unclear.

He turns the honey trap back around?

Well, no, I think he is honey trapped.

And then I think he just

goes along with it.

He just goes along with it.

I mean, it's hard to be sure.

I don't know what you think, but it feels more like the russians would have seen that this is a guy who's a businessman who's sympathetic to them who's working for a company which moves money around all that's kind of helpful so you can imagine russian intelligence would have gone this guy could be useful let's put a woman close to him not to blackmail him but just to to kind of work on him and build up relationships almost like a handler in a way yeah i think that's what it feels like i mean obviously it's hard to know and as a result that starts this connection with Russian intelligence.

And, you know, he goes to Syria with the Russians.

He seems to be kind of one of those people who's slightly obsessed with the world of espionage.

But anyway, the interesting link to our Bulgarians seems to be through Rusev, the great Yarmouth hotel owner, Dr.

Nefario.

And again, the link seems to be back from wirecard days.

According to the FT, Jan Marcelek, the businessman and Rusev, had met in 2015 when they were introduced by a mutual friend in London.

And it seems like that Rusev, remember who is the engineer comms specialist, was helping Jan Marselek with secure communications.

So with mobile phones that couldn't be hacked, or perhaps doing surveillance on other people, who knows?

But that kind of makes sense, doesn't it?

If you're a businessman who's in this murky world, you're looking for someone who can provide you with that kind of kit or speciality.

And we know Rusev was running a business doing that.

Marsalik, is he being tasked by the Russians or is it better to think of him as a really motivated volunteer who kind of looks out at Syria, looks at the UK, looks across the world and figures out where he can kind of make things happen?

Because it's interesting.

It just, it has a bit of a feel of these are people who Marcelek and Rusev who are kind of sympathetic to Russia and want to demonstrate their value.

right to to Putin and the people around him.

Yeah, that's right.

Because I think Rusev is getting his instructions from Marcelec.

We know from these messages.

So Marcelec is the kind of intermediary with Russian intelligence, looks like the GRU and the FSB, the Russian security service.

But it looks more like Marcelec is trying to make himself useful to Russian intelligence.

You know, he's almost like a kind of freelance operator in Moscow.

trying to prove his value to the people who he's got contacts with by saying, hey, look, I can do this.

I've got these people on the ground who can do this.

And, you know, he's trying to make himself a player and valuable in Moscow by engaging Rusev in turn to do this.

And in turn, Rusev is getting paid and he's paying then the minions to actually carry it out.

The gig economy has ruined everything, Gordon,

including proper clear-cut lines of control in a surveillance operation.

I mean, it is, it's like everyone's just kind of freelancing.

The psychology of this is fascinating, right?

Because even from some of the nicknames they give themselves, you can see that these are people who are fascinated with the world of espionage and probably feel

important

being part of it too, right?

So they're being paid and they get to feel cool at the same time and they get to freelance.

It's the gig economy come to the world of the spy business.

And so Gordon, maybe there we should take a break and when we come back, we will see how this all comes crashing down for Jan Marsalik and his group of Bulgarian minions.

See you after the break.

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Well, welcome back.

Our minions have hatched their nefarious plots and had all of their spy tech catalogued by the Metropolitan Police and they are arrested as we started these episodes, Gordon, in February of 2023.

And

I guess it seems given the volume of evidence, including all of those unencrypted messages, that it's a relatively clear-cut case in many ways.

Is that right?

Yeah, it is interesting, because you've got five of them who are arrested at the start on those raids in February 2023.

Famously, Zambazov in bed with Gabarova as well, rather than with his partner.

But Ivanchev, he's arrested a bit later, we should say.

He turns up at some of the addresses asking what's happened to people.

People get suspicious about him.

And initially, the group arrested are charged with ID fraud offences because they've got fake IDs.

And that's quite helpful while they build the case against them because it's going to take a while to kind of understand what evidence they've got.

But three of them, including Rusev, the boss, plead guilty.

And in a way, it's obvious, isn't it?

Because if you're caught with a ton of spy gear in your once hotel and messages from a Russian handler, it's kind of hard to make a case.

Your lawyer says plead guilty and then maybe you get out on good behavior in a few years or something like that.

But what's interesting is that another three, Ivanchev and the two women, Ivanova and Gabarova, are going to not plead guilty and they're going to go to trial.

And the crucial thing is they are going to argue they've been duped.

So they're going to say, not so much duped, but that they didn't know who they were working for.

And the prosecution case is going to be not necessarily that they have to be pro-Putin or pro-Russia, but they are working to Russia's benefit and had kind of knowledge and intentions to help Russia.

And they're going to base that on some of the communications, some of the gear, some of the facts of, you know, the kind of surveillance operations they're doing.

Yeah, their defense is fascinating because they're going to claim that Sambarzov was basically manipulating them by telling them that they were secretly working for Interpol.

Oh, interesting.

And it's kind of interesting because they claim that that was what they were told.

And he had some kind of fake Interpol IDs and the like, and that when they were carrying out these secret spy operations or whatever, they thought they were doing it for Interpol rather than for Russia.

Could that be true?

Interpol are like sharing information.

I know, but I guess if you were a, if you're not familiar with that world at all.

Could you believe that?

Yeah.

Could you believe it?

I don't know, or could you maybe have some suspicions?

But because I guess the question would be, is there anything in the communications that directly connects, from the standpoint of, let's say, Gaborova, the beautician, the work that she's doing to track Christo Grozev with...

Russia?

Yeah, but I think that's the point is that, you know, the fact that these were critics of Russia and Putin who are being tracked and surveilled, you know, is one indication of that.

And there was also some other information in there about them trying to get hold of equipment, and it was clear on behalf of Russia.

So I think the point was they couldn't really...

be under any illusions that this was ultimately for Russia.

And that was a lot of what it hinged on.

I mean, Gaborova says she's manipulated by Zembazov.

And she says, you remember in the previous episode, we talked about how he'd claimed he had brain cancer.

And that was why he was trying to balance out his relationship with these two women and explain some of his absences.

And Gabarova, who's our beautician, she of the Russian eyelashes, Acton, she kind of gets suspicious at one point, supposedly about his brain cancer.

And then he sends her images of himself supposedly recovering in hospital from surgery.

Now, I've got that image there.

And to me, I don't know what you think of it, but he's clearly got toilet paper around his head.

He's wrapped his head in toilet paper.

That's exactly what it looks like because he's on, he's on, it looks like he's on a video call with her here, right?

Yeah, and he doesn't look like he's in a hospital, and he just looks like he's lying down.

Is he maybe out at the spy base in Norfolk, right?

Um, the sort of emerald of the British Isles.

Thank you to her again, to our sponsors at the Norfolk Tourism Board.

But yeah, it looks like uh, it looks like toilet paper to me.

Anyway, she claims she was kind of manipulated and he was controlling her, but then it, you know, gets quite messy.

But all three who didn't plead guilty are found guilty.

And so in the end, all six get sentenced.

There are some interesting things to reflect on.

One of the unanswered questions from the trial.

is how they got onto this group in the first place.

I would guess very deliberately not answered by

our friends at the British Security Service or the Metropolitan Police, right?

Or

SIS.

I mean, when I've tried asking, I've not got any

issues with that question.

It would seem to me, I'm just hazarding a guess here.

I would guess it had to have been through Jan Marsalik, that communications, they got somewhere along the chain, his comms were intercepted or penetrated in Russia, I would think.

And then you sort of unravel the group that way, because it doesn't seem like there would have been a lot of reason for the police or the security service in the UK to be watching any of these people otherwise, right?

It's the connection to Marsalik and Moscow that makes them radioactive.

I'm just, I'm hazarding a guess there without any insider information, but that seems like a reasonable, a reasonable hypothesis.

Yeah, or they had some kind of source or penetration in Moscow of the GRU or the FSB who were telling them, you know, again, which would lead you from that end to get to the Bulgarians and the Minions rather than spotting the Minions doing stuff.

I agree.

That seems to make more sense.

I would also think that there would have been reasons given for breaking up the group if it were a tradecraft issue that had been spotted or a criminal issue that had been spotted in the UK by MI5 or the or the police.

Like, I think that that would have been part of the evidence probably submitted at trial or would have come out because it'd be more open.

Whereas this feels like it's in the spookier realm of what's actually going on in Russia, sort of leads you here.

Yeah, no, I think that makes sense.

Yeah.

So, as we come to the end, I guess, I mean, a few questions come out of it.

One of which is:

why would Russia use these guys?

Why use Dr.

Nefario and the minions?

I mean, lots of benefits, right?

They're cheap, they're expendable, clearly, very expendable,

and

they

can provide real value, even if it's amateur hour a lot of the time, right?

I mean, to me, the expendability part is critical.

I mean, just, you know, for a few hundred thousand Euro, you have a group of people you don't have to protect.

You don't have to get into any kind of diplomatic incident over.

These are not Russian intelligence officers who might need to be swapped back if they're caught doing something or whatever.

I mean, these are people you can just cut loose and cut them some minor checks that, in the grand scheme of things, are nothing.

And they might give you intel on, you know, Ukrainian air defense systems, potentially.

Another reason, I think, is that it has got harder for Russia to use its regular spies in Europe, particularly in the last, I guess, since 2018.

If you go back to the Salisbury poisoning, it's the first time you'd start to get real pressure on Russian embassies in Britain, but also across Europe, in which Russian diplomats, diplomats, but also spies, are expelled in huge numbers.

And that really accelerates after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

And you get, I think, 600 expulsions of Russian diplomats who are basically spies from different European countries.

So suddenly, you know, the Russians cannot carry out espionage in the same way from their embassies.

You know, they can no longer use them as platforms.

They can no longer, you know, run agents out of them.

They can no longer task people or do any of those things.

So you've got a lot of pressure, I think, over this period on those regular Russian spy networks in Europe, which might have been the people running this in the past.

And then you get pressure on the so-called illegal networks, which are the kind of people under deeper cover, not under diplomatic or legal cover, but illegal cover.

So these are people posing as businessmen or students.

And we've seen lots of those arrested as well and picked up after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

So I think that what you see is Russia turning to people like these Bulgarians.

You see them turning to proxies and criminals and others to do their dirty work.

I'm of two minds on this because I do think what you're saying is right, that

particularly post-Ukraine, it's a lot harder for the Russians.

Let's take what happened when the GRU was surveilling Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, and they used GRU officers to, you know, actually deliver the nerve agent to conduct the surveillance.

They flew in and out of the UK.

That's much harder to imagine now because of, I mean, in part because of groups like Bell and Cat and people like Christo Gruzev who have, who have exposed those kind of operations, but also because it's just a lot harder for Russians to operate, you know, in Western Europe since 2022.

So I think that is very clearly part of this case.

I mean, the other side of it, though, is that from the standpoint of

what kind of attributes do you want your unilateral surveillance network to have or group to have, this Bulgarian group, I think 10 years ago, would have still been valuable to them because they can move around Western Europe, they live in the UK, maybe we don't blend in exactly, but they're not Russians being dispatched from Moscow.

So, this is exactly the kind of group that a spy agency would want to recruit and use.

Because, again, you don't want to be using Russian intelligence officers for a lot of this work.

And I think that's true even 10 years ago.

One thing that probably is new is that

the leadership of it, the management of it, is being done remotely by Jan Marsalik in Moscow because the Russians don't have the sort of espionage presence in the UK that they would have 10 years ago?

I'd imagine 10 years ago, if you're running these Bulgarians, you might have someone in the Residentura in London who is managing them, overseeing them, running them, and then reporting it back to Moscow.

Whereas now you've got to do it remotely because you don't have the ability to really run it from the UK.

So I think there's a bit here where it's like nothing has changed, and there's another piece of it where groups like this are maybe even more important to the Russians because of how much pressure there has been.

Yeah, I think that's right.

And I think out of necessity, there's a looser relationship, isn't there?

Because you can't run them directly on the ground.

They're being run from Moscow, but through Marcel, who's a kind of cutout.

It's a looser model than you might have seen in the past, more like a contractor relationship that we were talking about, the kind of gig economy thought.

They're filling a gap in the market.

Marslek is also trying to kind of work his contacts over there.

It's a much looser network.

And I think we are seeing that more with Russia now, where it's also reaching out remotely over telegram, this network, to criminals, to other people in Britain, and saying, hey, go carry out this act of arson or sabotage, and we'll pay you some cryptocurrency to do it.

And those people might say, oh, we didn't realize it was for the Russian state.

So you get back to that question.

But you can suddenly task people and pay them remotely to carry out acts of espionage and sabotage on that kind of gig economy remote model, a looser model than the formal intelligence relationship of the past.

It made me think, you know, as we were talking here, about a lot of the recent spy cases involving the Iranians running assets inside Israel, where a lot of these people are recruited totally remotely, right?

By the Iranian intelligence services or cutouts to essentially complete particular acts inside Israel, but it's all run remotely without, you know, these sort of street meetings or any of the kind of classic pictures you'd have of espionage, right?

So it's not just happening in the Russian context either.

I mean, there's another question here, which is, you know, we've been using minions references quite liberally, I would say, perhaps too liberally, throughout these two episodes.

I mean, and I guess there's a question of whether these minions are sort of, are they clowns playing at spies or something much more dangerous?

It's a question you often get with these Russian spy cases because sometimes you can play up the comedy value, the ineptitude.

I mean, you've seen that with all kinds of the characters in lots of these operations.

And that's definitely the case here.

I mean, there is an element of absurdity, of black comedy, of the minions, of the weird relationships, of the slight grubby, slow horses aspect to this.

And yet, I think it's easy to overstate that and lose sight of the fact that it still could have been dangerous.

They're carrying out surveillance on people who were the targets for the Kremlin and who could have got killed based on the surveillance reports or kidnapped based on the surveillance reports supplied by this group or Ukrainians who could have been killed because the air defenses were taken out as a result of the work of this group.

So you can be stupid, you can be amateur in some of your activities.

It can have all of those things, and yet you can still be dangerous.

And I think that's one of the things that's, you know, sometimes a bit tricky to get your head around with these groups.

But I definitely think they were a serious spy ring, a really serious spy ring,

even if they were also the minions.

And I guess, though, maybe Gordon, before we go, we should mention that listeners should join us on Monday when we will have a very special announcement.

Top secret for the moment.

Top secret.

Top secret for the moment.

Highly classified.

That's right.

That's right.

A highly classified announcement will be totally declassified on Monday.

It is starting a new series on the subject of Edward Snowden.

So see you on Monday.

Thanks for listening.

We'll see you next week.