Episode 3: Thrill Seeking

Summary

Hot Money: Agent of Chaos
Season 3, Episode 3: Thrill Seeking
Release Date: June 17, 2025
Hosts/Authors: Pushkin Industries & Financial Times
Description: In this gripping episode, reporter Sam Jones delves deeper into the enigmatic life of Jan Marsalek, Wirecard’s Chief Operating Officer, whose disappearance amidst a €2 billion fraud scandal reveals ties to Russian espionage. Through the eyes of Cillian Kleinschmidt, a former UN humanitarian turned whistleblower, Jones uncovers a labyrinth of deceit, power struggles, and international intrigue.

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Introduction

Before diving into the heart of the episode, Sam Jones sets a cautionary tone for listeners:

Sam Jones [01:44]: "This episode contains descriptions of physical violence and war."

Cillian Kleinschmidt: An Unconventional Journey

The episode introduces Cillian Kleinschmidt, a man whose life has been anything but ordinary. Growing up in Berlin during the 1970s, Cillian sought alternative lifestyles from a young age, leading him through a series of unconventional endeavors.

Cillian Kleinschmidt [06:34]: "Making goat cheese, which is a pain in the neck because you have to get up at 4 in the morning, 5 o' clock in the morning, milking these bloody goats."

Cillian's journey took him from goat farming in southern France to founding a housing cooperative, working as a stuntman in the TV series Jeanne d'Arc, and eventually joining the United Nations’ humanitarian efforts across Africa and beyond. His experiences in war-torn regions like Uganda, South Sudan, and Somalia exposed him to the raw realities of conflict and survival.

Cillian Kleinschmidt [10:30]: "I was surrounded by war. I was surrounded by guns. Everything I was in fact afraid of, I was there, plentiful."

A Near-Death Experience and Transformation

In 1991, at the age of 29, Cillian faced a harrowing ordeal in Uganda:

Cillian Kleinschmidt [08:43]: "Now we're going to kill your baby. Then you hear our baby crying."

Instead of retreating, this traumatic experience catalyzed a profound transformation in Cillian. Determined to understand and confront violence, he immersed himself further into dangerous zones, evolving from a "soft goat-keeping hippie guy" into a hardened manager entrenched in conflict.

Cillian Kleinschmidt [12:58]: "I started to feel already very good at this. That was just basically after two and a half years of being in war zones, and it felt I was a champion."

The Intersection with Jan Marsalek

After decades of frontline work, Cillian sought a semblance of normalcy and established an aid consultancy in Vienna amidst Europe’s migrant crisis. It was here that an Austrian lobbyist introduced him to Jan Marsalek, the enigmatic COO of Wirecard, who expressed interest in stabilizing Libya.

Cillian Kleinschmidt [15:54]: "I have a client called Jan Marsalek. He's the COO of Wirecard, but this is in his private capacity. He wants to contribute to the stabilization of Libya."

Intrigued by Marsalek’s proposition, Cillian invested personal funds to develop a feasibility study aimed at restoring law and order in Libya. However, inconsistencies soon surfaced:

Cillian Kleinschmidt [27:48]: "But then, no money, there was no payment coming."

Unveiling the Espionage Connection

Persistent issues with funding led Cillian to confront Marsalek, revealing the depth of his suspicions. The involvement of a Colonel Andrei Chuprigin from the purported "Libyan Russian Institute" raised red flags about Marsalek’s true affiliations.

Sam Jones [35:12]: "Jan, one cannot work. He's too close to the Russians."

Further investigations and a chance encounter with a military contact confirmed Cillian’s fears:

Sam Jones [46:58]: "Marsalek really did have ties to Russian spies. Specifically, it seemed to the GRU, Russia's fearsome military intelligence agency..."

Wirecard’s Collapse and Marsalek’s Disappearance

Simultaneously, Wirecard’s facade began to crumble. In 2020, after persistent reporting, it was revealed that the missing €2 billion might have been a sophisticated fraud orchestrated by Marsalek.

Cillian Kleinschmidt [45:22]: "The missing $2 billion may never have existed at all."

Following the scandal, Marsalek vanished, further deepening the mystery surrounding his activities and connections to Russian intelligence.

Cillian's Sacrifice and Ongoing Peril

Cillian’s relentless pursuit of the truth came at a personal cost. He faced financial ruin and became the target of relentless pressure and threats, highlighting the perilous nature of uncovering high-stakes corruption intertwined with international espionage.

Cillian Kleinschmidt [47:29]: "I was promised things which never happened, and so on. So almost by design. And it led to one of the most horrible years in my life, being completely destitute."

Despite his vulnerabilities, Cillian's revelations have been pivotal in shedding light on the broader implications of Marsalek’s actions and their connections to global power dynamics.

Conclusion: The Ongoing Mystery

As the episode concludes, Sam Jones emphasizes that the story of Jan Marsalek and his espionage activities is far from over, posing lingering questions about Russia’s broader strategic objectives and the extent of Marsalek’s involvement in international finance and intelligence.

Sam Jones [47:29]: "What Cillian revealed about Marsalek was. It still is wild. But it wasn't the end of the story at all. It was really just the beginning."

Key Takeaways:

• Cillian Kleinschmidt’s unconventional paths led him from humanitarian work to uncovering a complex web of fraud and espionage involving Jan Marsalek.
• Jan Marsalek utilized his position at Wirecard to further covert operations aligned with Russian intelligence, revealing the depths of international financial corruption.
• The intertwining of financial fraud and espionage underscores the vulnerabilities within global financial systems and the lengths to which state actors may go to manipulate them.
• Cillian’s personal sacrifices highlight the dangers faced by whistleblowers in exposing high-level corruption and espionage.

This episode masterfully intertwines personal narratives with broader geopolitical implications, offering listeners a profound understanding of the intricate dance between finance, espionage, and personal courage.

Transcript

[Sam Jones]

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[Sam Jones]

Before we begin, I just wanted to warn you. This episode contains descriptions of physical violence and war. Previously on Hot Money. At that point we just kind of had this sense that Marsalik was this kind of man of action and was mixed up somehow in Viennese politics.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

I know politics is corrupt. I know everything. I know that. I know that. I believe to know that. But this is too much. I thought, I hope that he will talk to you and you will be able to investigate on it. And perhaps misdeeds and misbehavior is stopped.

[Sam Jones]

I'm in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia in North Africa. I'm in a taxi on the way to meet Cillian Kleinschmidt. When I first met Kilian at Cafe Prokhul in Vienna, he began to unravel what he knew about Jan Marsalek. It was a fantastical tale. It seemed impossible to substantiate. And as far as Cillian was concerned at the time, it was absolutely not for publication. But I believed it. And one of the reasons I did was because I found out more about who Cillian is not just a fantasist, someone who should be taken deadly seriously. We kept in touch and now he's ready to talk to me on tape. I can't tell you exactly where he lives. In fact, we've put our phones in Faraday bags to come here. Electromagnetic shields that will stop the phones giving away our location. Everything on this trip will be cash only. But what I'll say is it's a big private house on the edge of a fashionable area of the city. It's surrounded by a high white wall, like all the houses on this dusty street, and there are great clumps of magenta bougainvillea spilling over the top. It is this way.

[Unknown]

Bye.

[Sam Jones]

Cillian, I learned, has never led a conventional life. I'm not even sure he knows what one is. And perhaps that's why he ended up getting so involved in one of Jan Marsalek's wildest schemes. Something so left field that it helped me truly see Marsalek's ambitions. Something about the lives of tens of thousands of the world's most desperate people and how they might be controlled, used. I've often found that people who operate outside the mainstream can be weirdly drawn together, sometimes meeting in the ambiguous space between what the world deems to be good and bad. We tend to think that our values are at the core of us. But people on the edge, well, they can sometimes show us how fragile that notion can be. In this episode, we're going to hear Killian's story and how he found himself in Jan Marsalek's world, one very close, but very different to his own.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

I have said this, or sensed this, that certain things in my life since then have gone terribly wrong. That I sometimes think, this can't be a coincidence.

[Sam Jones]

I'm Sam Jones from the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries. This is hot money. Season 3 Agent of Chaos Episode 3 Thrill Seeking so, where do you want us? Cillian?

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

As we call it the Instagram.

[Sam Jones]

We're walking across a big open plan room that takes up almost the whole ground floor. It's cool and airy, and Cillian is directing us over to an arrangement of low sofas around a coffee table. He's left the dogs outside, but indoors, there's an assortment of cats who indifferently reveal themselves to us over the next few hours. Cillian grew up in Berlin in the 1970s, and he felt drawn to alternative ways of life from a young age. After some hard partying as a young punk teen, he left Germany aged just 18 to go and live in the mountains in southern France. And so first there were the goats, 35 goats, to be exact.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

Making goat cheese, which is a pain in the neck because you have to get up at 4 in the morning, 5 o' clock in the morning, milking these bloody goats.

[Sam Jones]

So your first job was as a goat farmer?

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

Basically, yes.

[Sam Jones]

Later, he founded a housing cooperative, learned how to be a roofer, and picked up a series of odd jobs along the way.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

Worked as a stuntman. Somehow I.

[Sam Jones]

Any movies we might know?

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

It was a TV series. Jeanne d' Arc.

[Sam Jones]

Jeanne d' Arc, as in Joan of Arc?

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

Yes.

[Sam Jones]

Okay. But Killian was still restless. He left France and he decided to tour Africa on a motorbike. And in doing that, he stumbled into humanitarian and peacekeeping work through a chance encounter over what else but drinks.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

I always tell people when they ask me, how did you do your career? I mean, how do you apply? And so I said, I go into bars.

[Sam Jones]

These are my favorite kind of stories. In a bar in Mocktee, a city in Mali, Cillian met a young French couple. They were building a school, and he. Well, he had those roofing skills, so he helped them out and things just took off from there. He got more construction jobs in the aid world. His responsibilities grew. Eventually, Cillian became a trusted partner for the un working across Africa. He'd found the unconventional life he was looking for, but he'd yet to experience real danger. And then one day, all that changed. In 1991, Cillian was 29, with a young family. They were living happily in Uganda. It was early in the morning, so he didn't hear them come in. Four men, armed. He woke up, his wife next to him with a Kalashnikov pressed against his head. Someone had told these four boys, really, that he had $30,000 hidden in the house. It was a setup.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

And then they did everything with me. What you can do to someone you try to get $30,000 from, as in.

[Sam Jones]

They beat you up, or beating me.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

Up, putting me against the wall and saying, now we shoot in your legs. Now we rape your wife. Now we, oh, we just killed your gardener. We just, oh, by the way, we killed your cook. Now we're going to kill your baby. Then you hear our baby crying.

[Sam Jones]

I mean, in that moment, did you think you were going to die?

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

Yes. Because there were four guys looking for something they don't get, getting increasingly agitated and angry. And I said, that's it.

[Sam Jones]

They turned the house upside down. The money, of course, wasn't there. But for Whatever reason, they didn't kill Cillian. In fact, thankfully, they didn't kill anyone. They just left Killian badly beaten up. The horror of that experience would have broken most people. And maybe it did Cillian, but not how you would expect. I guess most other people or many other people would think, okay, that's it. I'm moving back to the Pyrenees with my wife and my young child. I'm guessing that you didn't do that.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

Yeah, that's kind of correct. My wife said, I had it. I need a break somehow. Then she left for Canada for many months. And I went and said, now I need to go into it. I need to deep dive into violence.

[Sam Jones]

And he did. In the coming years, Cillian would put himself, using his connections in the UN into the most dangerous places he could. When the fighting died down in one place, he moved somewhere else, often somewhere with an even more challenging humanitarian situation. South Sudan, Somalia, Zaire, Sri Lanka. He describes days hiding in swamps while being hunted by militias.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

I was surrounded by war. I was surrounded by guns. Everything I was in fact afraid of, I was there, plentiful. I mean, I had sort of transformed from the soft goat keeping hippie guy into a tough sort of manager in the middle of the war. I mean, transformation goes pretty fast, I must say.

[Sam Jones]

He told me about one time his compound in Mogadishu was attacked.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

When we get out of the bunker, security says it's all over.

[Sam Jones]

But there's one guy lying in the street in an army uniform, and too late, they realize he's a suicide bomber.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

And he pulls the trigger and then sort of all the body parts fly over the wall and the grain between us. So today, when there's a dead mouse somewhere, that's when everything comes back. That's when the images come back of dead bodies on the road.

[Sam Jones]

In another story, he tells me it's the height of the battle for control of Mogadishu when he and a few others climb up onto the roof of the hotel where they're staying. At dusk, a heavy orange sun is in the sky.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

So we were sitting there with a few people having beer or whiskey or so, which we still managed to get. And watching the fighting. I mean, it was crazily wild, pervertly romantic. In the same time, like watching Apocalypse now or something, seeing the Black Hawks and other choppers flying into the sunset and then again fighting somewhere and shooting. And you're sitting on your roof and you're having your whiskey.

[Sam Jones]

The horror. It's also bound up with the thrill with the sense that this and not the comforts of a peaceful home life is what's real. And I do get it. Even listening to Cillian recount this stuff is intoxicating. There's a powerful, hugely seductive kind of beauty to it. It's disturbing in some ways, but also cinematic. And who hasn't thought about their lives as a film? Can I just ask, how were you feeling during this? Were you afraid? I mean, given that you've described earlier that in a way you wanted to plunge into violence, to cure yourself of your fear of it, maybe, or to somehow kind of move beyond it.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

I mean, that's also what humanitarian organizations are exploiting in a way, because they're getting people into this sort of this adrenaline hyper thing, and they begin to feel invincible. You're becoming the coolest of the coolest in all of this. I mean, you're completely hyped up. I mean, I started to feel already very good at this. That was just basically after two and a half years of being in war zones, and it felt I was a champion.

[Sam Jones]

It sounds like a bit of an addiction.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

Of course it's an addiction, but it's being also used by the organization.

[Sam Jones]

The organization meaning the un, his employer at the time. This is how Cillian sees it.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

So they're identifying the people becoming junkies, and they set them a shot from time to time so they stay junkies. You don't get the chance to cool down and get back to your family. I mean, I had a family at the time sitting in Nairobi. But recuperation becomes stressful because nobody understands you. I mean, your colleagues become your friends and your family. They understand what it means. When you say, well, we had an ied, we had an improvised explosive device, or we had a vbaid. They understand what it means. Yes, there has been a car bomb. Nobody else understands. Nobody understands the feeling of what it means.

[Sam Jones]

Cillian climbs the UN ladder. But over time, he finds his maverick methods rub up against an increasingly bureaucratic organization. And the way humanitarian work is funded is changing too. NGO and government budgets are going down. The private sector institutions and individual wealthy donors are becoming more important than ever. Over time, Cillian begins to feel that perhaps he should at least try a more normal way of life. So after three decades, finally in 2014, Cillian decides to leave the UN. He settles in Vienna, as far as he can settle, and launches an aid consultancy. A burgeoning migrant crisis on Europe's borders and in the Balkans in particular means he's in high demand, but he doesn't exactly thrill to the work. European governments are mostly looking to find short term domestic solutions for the problem. They don't want to do the hard stuff tackling it at its source in Africa and the Middle East. The consultancy work is all about fundraising meetings with stakeholders Tra La La over canapes and PowerPoints. It's not a very Killian kind of world. Enter Jan Marsalek. It was around this time that an Austrian lobbyist government connected got in touch. He tells I want you to meet someone.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

I have a client called Jan Marsalek. He's the COO of Wirecard, but this is in his private capacity. He wants to contribute to the stabilization of Libya.

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[Sam Jones]

In 2018, Killian gets an invitation to come and meet his new prospective backer, Marsalek. Marsalek suggests they meet at the Keerschenke, the very place he met my editor Paul Murphy and handed him the chemical formula for Novichok. Kfe Schenke in English means the Ladybird Tavern. Ladybug if you're American, there are little ladybird emblems and pictures dotted around, but it's not kitschy. This is still a white tablecloth place. All Cillian knows is that he's meeting a wealthy Austrian businessman he's never heard of Jan Marsalek, but that's not an issue, at least nothing a little keyboard due diligence can't smooth.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

Started googling a bit and okay. Big huge DAX company.

[Sam Jones]

The DAX is Germany's main stock market index, the 40 largest public German companies, a bit like the S&P 500 or the FTSE 100. It signals to Cillian that Wirecard and Marsilec should be taken seriously.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

I had been sort of a lot looking into how the industry, how business can actually do what the humanitarians can't do. So I thought it was a great idea that if somebody has personal interests or business interests actually contributes. And it's not humanitarians who are going to stabilize places, it's business. It's this type of other resources which the humanitarian world will never produce.

[Sam Jones]

Cillian has been told that Marsalek is interested in funding humanitarian projects in Libya. Libya was a mess since the Qaddafi regime was deposed in 2011 at the height of the Arab Spring. It had been mired in civil war. Nothing about its future seemed at that point certain. And it was also, thanks to its newfound lawlessness, a highway for African refugees looking to get into Europe the longest then unpatrolled coastline of any African country on the Mediterranean. A reporter with the FT Bozu Daragahi was on the ground to see what conditions in one of the country's notorious migrant detention centers were like.

[Unknown]

Hot, dirty, overcrowded cells like this one are a way of life. At the Karabuli migrant detention center, just east of Libya's capital, Tripoli, rooms meant for perhaps 20 people are commonly filled with 100. These men, women and children have come from as far as Eritrea and Ethiopia. They risk their lives along desert smuggling routes lined with bandits and other dangers.

[Sam Jones]

But Libya was also a place rich in opportunities for those with an appetite for danger. A huge oil exporting nation, a major military power in Africa, a playground for spies. The prospect of some work there tantalized. Cillian Marsalek arrives for lunch. He's all Polish.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

You get a little bit jealous. Well, this guy is much younger than me and he is good looking and he is well dressed. Everything he has smells money and care and everything is perfect and I come with my cheap trousers and whatnot.

[Sam Jones]

A little envy prompts some German Austrian rivalry.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

Well, it's a typical Austrian sort of showing off person. I've seen many of those in Vienna.

[Sam Jones]

Over lunch, the conversation becomes competitive, what.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

I call always the male cockfight. In the beginning they try to impress the other one of how cool you are and how tough you are and where you have been and so on.

[Sam Jones]

This is you and Marsalek.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

Yeah, Marsalek. You know how two cocks are when they're showing the nice feathers and so on.

[Sam Jones]

Cillian tells Marsalek stories. He recounts the dangerous, violent and volatile situations he has lived in around the world. But Marsalek is not to be outdone.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

And then very fast actually, he started then talking about his experience in Syria, facilitated by the boys just after the recapture of the city of Penyla from isis.

[Sam Jones]

When he said, with the boys, what did you say?

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

He basically said, with the Russians.

[Sam Jones]

Marsalek tells Cillian that he arrived in syria in a MiG8. He describes how the helicopter banked and turned and with a blast of dry hot air through the open door, he looked down on the vast ruins of Roman Palmyra below. He was the guest of the head of intelligence for the Wagner Group, Russia's most notorious mercenary army. They didn't linger. Marsalek said it was too dangerous. But there was time for some photos. I've seen those photos. There's a hastily snapped selfie in front of the amphitheater and another shot in front of a burned out tank and one of him aiming a bazooka in all of them. Marsalek is posing basically in body armour and sometimes wearing dark blue aviators. To me, he seems almost boyishly excited. What's remarkable is that Marsalek's story, all this boasting about being in Syria, didn't strike Cillian as unusual at the time. But Kylian is not a very usual kind of person.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

It didn't click in my head that it's a bit strange that a payment provider would be going into such an area.

[Sam Jones]

If it had clicked, maybe he could have avoided what happened next. I can only assume Cillian wasn't taken aback because of the way Marsalek framed the story. He told Cillian that when he saw war ravaged Syria for himself, he realized he wanted to stop that kind of thing from happening elsewhere, like in Libya. Marsalek convinced Cillian that he wanted to make a difference, to make the world a better place, as Cillian understood it. Marsalek wanted to commission a development plan, a blueprint for how to end lawlessness on Libya's southern border, where there was no government control.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

He spoke about the gold mines at the border to Chad, where people have to work for two years to get their passage to Europe paid off. He spoke about the guys sitting in Monaco and being the people behind the whole business, that they were earning $100 per person crossing into Europe. He displayed sort of a more emotional, something has to be done to stop all of that. And, and, and maybe I felt that he was genuine in that somehow he sounds quite impressive. It didn't click as sort of a political ploy at that moment. It felt more, yes, I want to do something, I want to contribute, so I will put €200,000 into you, Kylian and your team so that there should be collateral financing to have a full plan of what to do with Libya so that this doesn't happen.

[Sam Jones]

Cillian came away from his first lunch with Jan Marslek feeling good about his new project and his new client. He built a team and he got to work doing research and making plans to pull together a kind of feasibility study on how to bring law and order to the region and improve the lives of the people living there, who to speak to and what to say to them. But it wasn't long before there were signs that not all was as it seemed. Cillian had been told that he could trust Marsalek's handshake and that Marsalek wouldn't sign a contract anyway. So there wasn't much Cillian could do about what happened next.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

But then, no money, there was no payment coming.

[Sam Jones]

I mean, did it not strike you as odd that there's this wealthy backer who has money and he's just not.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

Not paying? Yes, of course. I said, what is this? I mean, you told me it's unshaked quality. Fine. We engaged without a contract. Should have never done this. Big mistake.

[Sam Jones]

At this point, Kilian is still dealing with Marsalek through an intermediary, Marsalek's lobbyist in Vienna. And after a lot of pestering about the missing finance, the intermediary gives him a very strange answer. He says, send your invoice to to the Libyan Russian Institute in Moscow. Which is odd because no such institute even seems to exist there. There's more. When Cillian suggests that they should organize a trip to Libya so he can talk to his backer about his plans and show him how they might work on the ground, he gets told this will also be arranged, but from Moscow.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

That trip will be organized by Colonel Andrei Chuprigin in Moscow. So who is Colonel Andrei Chuprigin? Oh, he is the coordinator of Russian interests in Northern Africa and the Middle East.

[Sam Jones]

By now I'm thinking for almost anyone, the jig would be up. Whatever this project was, it was not simply some idea from an Austrian businessman with a good heart and an open chequebook. Cillian, though, still didn't pull the plug, maybe because at this point he's already paid his team a considerable amount of money from his own pocket and he's really quite proud of the work they've done, the study they've begun to produce. So he needs to sort things out one way or the other. And the only way to do that is to demand another face to face meeting with Marsalek. And that's how in February 2018, Killian finds himself standing on a street corner in a wealthy district of Munich. On the opposite side of the street is the Russian Consulate. He's waiting directly outside a grand four story Grunderzeit 19th century villa.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

One of these big mansions you will find in Vienna, you will find in Munich, you will find in all the central European cities where very wealthy business families built this.

[Sam Jones]

At some point it's so big, he struggles to figure out how to get in. There doesn't seem to be a doorbell.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

When somehow the doors of the villa, they open mysteriously.

[Sam Jones]

This is Jan Marsalek's house and personal office. Marsalek meets Cillian, who is With a colleague on the first floor. There's some impressive contemporary art on the walls, but not a lot else.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

Normal people, when they live in a place, there is always some crap lying around. I mean, it's a place where we kind of live. And when I come in a place like that, it feels like it's like a showroom. It's nothing personal.

[Sam Jones]

They enter a capacious meeting room. There's a spread of coffee, juices and biscuits. They make small talk and then they get down to business. But it doesn't go well.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

Marcellig was visibly bored. He sort of treated us as little boys who came up with ridiculous humanitarian crap. Basically said, this is all child's stuff. This is children's stuff. This is too small. I was thinking big projects, industries. I mean, basically dismissed what we had done.

[Sam Jones]

But Marsalek is excited about something else. He's got a video he wants to show Cillian.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

I have in German as a Geil. I mean, exciting video material.

[Sam Jones]

Gael, in this context, I think you'd probably best translate as sexy. Cool. Marsalek seems pretty psyched up about it. It's a video filmed using some new military equipment. Body cams worn by soldiers, body cams worn by Wagner, the Russian mercenary army. Marsalek is interested in getting some of these cameras for his own purposes. He boasts to Killian that the content of the video is shocking.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

I can't show it because the boys are killing all the prisoners. So it can't be used in public.

[Sam Jones]

Because the video is graphic footage of people being murdered.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

Yes, but it's great footage and so on. It's pity. Basically we can't show it. But let's talk about all this after the meeting.

[Sam Jones]

What were you thinking when he was saying that?

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

I said, oh, shit, there's something going on here.

[Sam Jones]

Cillian finally begins to understand that this humanitarian project is not at all what it seems. Trying to move things on from the video, Cillian asks how this relates to their work. The answer chills Cillian. He says Marsalek told him, what I.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

Want really is to convert militiamen into border guards. 15, 20,000, something big, and we train and equip them and so on.

[Sam Jones]

He wants to create a military force in Libya, a border guard that would stop migrants crossing into or out of Libya. He wants to equip it and fund it and control it.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

That was sort of a key moment where I said, there is something very wrong.

[Sam Jones]

Afterwards, Cillian replayed that meeting over and over in his head. He asked himself, who is Jan Marsalek. Really, he couldn't come up with a clear answer, and perhaps since his invoices were still open, he didn't want to. But there was something about the whole situation which made him think that Marsalek might not just be a wealthy fantasist, that he might be serious about these proposals, and he might even have the means to achieve them. He tried to ignore that feeling until he couldn't.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

It really sort of clicked completely later that year, and I think October, November.

[Sam Jones]

That'S when Cillian bumped into a military contact who had also been working on the side with Marsalek. He tells him, killian, you know, with.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

Jan, one cannot work. He's too close to the Russians. So from that point onwards, and that's late 2018, here I am with something where I know there is a lot more to the whole story.

[Unknown]

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[Sam Jones]

Cillian Kleinschmidt knows he has potentially explosive information about Jan Marsalek. But Cillian also knows he has to be careful. He knows Austria well enough now, enough to know that Marsalek, while somewhat in the shadows, seems to be extremely well connected. Months go by and then in the summer of 2019, Killian sees an opportunity to raise the alarm. He's in Tunis and he's invited to a garden party at the residence of the Austrian ambassador to Libya, who's based there. He grabs a few minutes with the.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

Host and I explained to him the story that an Austrian national very much doing strange things Libya and whether it was on their radar screen and so on. And when I had finished the story then he said, you have to be careful. It could be one of them.

[Sam Jones]

You have to be careful. I could be one of them. Even though this sounds ominous, when I first heard this I took it as a joke and the ambassador confirmed as much to me. He told me he remembers meeting Cillian, but doesn't recall exactly what he said, and that making joking remarks sounds like something he'd probably do just to try and break the ice. He wanted to make clear though that he didn't and doesn't have a connection to Marsalek. Regardless, back then at this party, Cillian is already feeling nervous and gets the impression he should hold his tongue. An impression Reinforced when a year later, at the same garden party, the ambassador joked again.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

That's when he said in front of other people and saying, oh, that's Kleinschmitt. Yeah, I have the instruction to not let you out alive. Obviously, humor. But it was menacing as well. Kind of menacing, kind of immature.

[Sam Jones]

I mean, even though it was a joke, there is a slight message there for you. He's trying to tell you something, which is maybe that you're annoying or maybe you should shut up.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

But basically, yes.

[Sam Jones]

So from then on, Cillian only speaks to one or two close friends about Marsalek. He worries that if he tells anyone who knows him less well, he might land himself in serious trouble or end up sounding like, well, a bit cracked. Another unpaid contractor with an axe to grind and a conspiracy to peddle. But other events at the time, they keep making him question again and again, just what was Marsalek up to? A few months after Cillian broke off his connection with Marsalek, he moved to northern Greece. The borders were closed. Huge numbers of migrants were trying to come into Europe from the Levant due to the war raging in Syria. Even though Cillian's officially retired from the un, he'd remained plugged in. Thanks to Cillian's years of frontline work, his network of sources bring him disturbing nuggets of information about the situation. They tell him, even though the borders are closed, it seems that over and over again, desperate groups of migrants believe otherwise. They're being fed lies.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

Through my network, we found out that somehow there were rumors spread that Merkel would open the borders again.

[Sam Jones]

Angela Merkel, Germany's chancellor at the time. She had already accepted hundreds of thousands of migrants into Germany.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

We found very strong indications, even photos of people who were in different locations telling that story. And this story went from northern Iraq and it was in Turkey. It was in the entire region. The sort of go Europe.

[Sam Jones]

Telling that story to refugees in camps.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

And camps and out of camps already on the move, already in Greece and so on. So people started moving in this direction.

[Sam Jones]

Hospitals are being bombed in Syria at the time by the Russians, who are fighting alongside their client Bashar Assad, the country's ruler. They seem to be deliberately worsening the humanitarian crisis, and something for Cillian falls into place. What if the Russians are spreading these lies about open borders in Europe too? He makes the leap back to Marsalek. What if Marsalek wanted to do something similar in southern Libya, to use a force controlling the border to influence migrant flows? At first, it all feels too outlandish to him. But with time, he starts to believe it. For the most part, though, he keeps all these suspicions to himself out of fear. Until the day he spoke to me. When Cillian told it to me, it rang bells. I thought straight away of the late US Senator John McCain. He'd said the very same thing in 2016 at the Munich Security Conference with reference to Syria.

[John McCain]

Mr. Putin is not interested in being our partner. He wants to shore up the Assad regime. He wants to re establish Russia as a major power in the Middle East. He wants to use Syria as a live fire exercise for Russia's modernizing military. And he wants to exacerbate the refugee crisis and use it as a weapon to divide the Transit Atlantic alliance and undermine the European project.

[Sam Jones]

Russia's interest in weaponizing migration was being taken seriously as a threat to NATO by the world's biggest military power, the usa. So this idea of Killian's, that Marsalek could be working for Russia in Libya to control migration for political influence, it's actually not as far fetched as it seems. Then six months after I first met Killian in June 2020, something happened. Extraordinary story. Admission, of course, from payments firm Wirecard this week that the missing $2 billion may never have existed at all. After months of tireless reporting by my colleague at the FT, Dan McCrum, Wirecard, the fintech giant Marslek had helped build as chief operating officer, the corporate edifice around which he had constructed his entire public Persona collapsed.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

Meanwhile, Wirecard's auditors are in hot water too. EY says a $2.1 billion hole in the firm's accounts is the result of sophisticated fraud.

[Unknown]

Now, Marcus Brown, of course, has resigned, or has resigned on Friday as the CEO of that company. The chief operating officer was also sacked over the weekend.

[Sam Jones]

Once Wirecard exploded some of the other people involved in Marsalek's Libya scheme, they became more talkative. And within, well, just four weeks or so, Cillian's crazy tale went from being an unprintable conspiracy to an established set of facts we could attribute to multiple sources. But I wanted to be certain we weren't over interpreting Marsalek's links to Russian intelligence. So I went with what we knew to one of my most important contacts. I can't really tell you about them. That's a condition of me being in touch with them. But they work for a European government. Let's leave it there. They confirmed what I thought. Marsalek really did have ties to Russian spies. Specifically, it Seemed to the gru, Russia's fearsome military intelligence agency, the organization responsible for the Salisbury poisonings. Cillian decided he wanted to go public. He outed himself and gave testimony to a special committee of the German parliament investigating Wirecard. Cillian doesn't regret doing that. But he's also, over time, become more and more convinced that he was right to be afraid. His life has never quite been the same. Twice now he's been on the edge of financial ruin thanks to projects he's gotten involved in which have exploded in his face. And he doesn't think it's a coincidence.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

It may not be sort of the extreme sort of movie style revenge, but it may be a sort of destroy option of guiding me and leading me into. Into traps, which is very intelligent if you want to make somebody suffer. I was promised things which never happened, and so on. So almost by design. And it led to one of the most horrible years in my life, being completely destitute.

[Sam Jones]

In fact, even now he struggles. He keeps being approached by odd characters, people connected to Russia who seem to be trying to lure him into misadventures. For all his experience, his bravery and his force of personality, Cillian still ended up vulnerable. What Cillian revealed about Marsalek was. It still is wild. But it wasn't the end of the story at all. It was really just the beginning. It was a revelation that triggered as many questions as it answered. Was Marsalek working exclusively for the Russians? Was he a kind of freelancer? Did the wirecard fraud involve Russia too? What did Russia want from Marsalek? The obvious person to ask, of course, was Marsalek himself. Except we couldn't. On June 17, 2020, with Wirecard's management, employees and shareholders still reeling from the fact that billions were missing, Jan Marsalek told colleagues he was urgently flying to Manila, where the money was supposed to have disappeared. He said he was going to sort out the mystery and prove Wicard had nothing to hide. Except in reality, he was in a car heading across the Alps. It was a beautiful day. Hot, a clear blue sky. Perfect weather to fly bad. Wurslau Airport is a small regional airstrip in Austria used mostly by amateur aviators. A car pulled up on the tarmac that day and out stepped Jan Marsalek. The border checks were a formality. No one was really watching down there. Marsalek had a suitcase with him. It was full of cash. Here's your fare, he must have told the pilot. Next stop, Minsk, Belarus. Coming up on Hot Money. The people who were left behind trying to make sense of it all.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

And we walked around and unbelievable. You walk around and you see a parallel world and all the explanation yeah, this room is soundproof. This room is got searched every other week by a specialist for microphones and surveillance stuff.

[Unknown]

We were flabbergasted.

[Sam Jones]

We were speechless.

[Unknown]

It had never happened like that.

[Cillian Kleinschmidt]

I mean, we were all important people in the company. That it was like a punch in the face. Top 10 White Collar Crime of this century. That was a.

[Sam Jones]

What Hot Money is a production of the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries. It was written and reported by me, Sam Jones. The senior producer and co writer is Peggy Sutton. Our producer is Izzy Carter. Our researcher is is Marine Saint. Our show is edited by Karen Shakurji. Fact checking by Kira Levine. Sound design and mastering by Jake Gorski and Marcelo de Oliveira with additional sound design by Izzy Carter. Original music from Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphonette. Our show art is by Sean Carney. Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley, Amy Gaines McQuaid and Matthew Garaghan. Additional editing by Paul Murphy. Special thanks to Roula Clough, Dan McCrum, Laura Clark, Alistair Mackey, Manuele Zaragoza, Nigel Hansen, Vicky Merrick, Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Jake Flanagan, Jacob Goldstein, Sarah Nix and Greta Cohn. I'm Sam Jones.

[Unknown]

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Off terms apply it is Ryan Seacrest here. There was a recent social media trend which consisted of flying on a plane with no music, no movies, no entertainment. But a better trend would be going to chumbacasino.com it's like having a mini social casino in your pocket. Chumba casino has over 100 online casino style games all all absolutely free. It's the most fun you can have online and on a plane. So grab your free welcome bonus [e-mail] sponsored by Chumba Casino.

[Sam Jones]

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[Unknown]

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[Sam Jones]

This is an iHeart podcast.