← Hot Money: Agent of Chaos
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- [00:00]
Host
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [00:05]
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- [01:18]
Sam Jones
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, she murders her husband, but. 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 size Trump figure in the office and his in marshall in martial office and his altar of Russian officers? Caps like Ushanka? Kind of. Yeah, those heads. Yeah.
- [01:59]
Host
I think the biggest tragedy of Jan.
- [02:01]
Sam Jones
Marsalek is he probably could have earned millions gazillions with his charm and his.
- [02:09]
Host
Wit and his business acumen and his skills that he didn't need to be what he turned out to be.
- [02:28]
Sam Jones
This is Porto Cul, which is the kind of marina in the center 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.
- [03:00]
Paul Murphy
Big sub of these.
- [03:01]
Sam Jones
Yeah, that one's really big.
- [03:02]
Paul Murphy
That must be 60 meters or something.
- [03:04]
Sam Jones
Yeah. And then look at this. Okay, 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, playground.
- [03:26]
Paul Murphy
Well, there are specific reasons people do come here, aren't there? You know, there's tax because there isn't any income tax.
- [03:33]
Sam Jones
Right.
- [03:34]
Paul Murphy
There's security is quite important.
- [03:37]
Sam Jones
Security because they won't be snooped on.
- [03:41]
Paul Murphy
I think that's one aspect. But also just kind of old fashioned. Won't get robbed, won't get kidnapped.
- [03:48]
Sam Jones
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, superyacht after superyacht 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.
- [04:33]
Paul Murphy
You know, on the three occasions I had lunch with Jan Marslig in London, well, first two in London, the third one in Munich. He would always choose the most expensive lunching venue. Marslit is attracted to kind of overt wealth, displays of overt wealth. You clearly always like to rub shoulders with the super rich. And this is a great place to do it and as such a natural place for Marseille to, to appear.
- [05:07]
Sam Jones
And before the collapse of Wirecard, Jan Mars Lek was here on the Caudesieux, 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 Marsalek 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 skeptical of the Kremlin's interest in peace. But Marsalek, 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 Agent of chaos. Episode 5 A different set of Rules the most widely reported story of how Marsalek 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, but 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 around a table having drinks or whatever, talking for Natalia's 30th birthday. Natalia Zlobina, a glamorous woman Jan Marsalek 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 Marsalek striding towards a megayacht 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 Der 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 Marsalek to a man named Stas. Stas Petlinski, a Russian military man who has connections to the gru, Russian military intelligence and the agency we understood Marsalek to be working with in Libya. And what some reporters say happened is on the yacht, Stas recruits Jan to work for Russian intelligence. They quote a source who witnessed the early days of Marsalek's friendship with Stas. They say you can see Marsalek from two perspectives. Marsalek before Stas and Marsalek after Stas. This possible moment of Marsalek'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 Marsalek did say yes. What we still don't know is why. Hi, Boris.
- [10:06]
Boris Volodyarski
Hi. Hello, Sam.
- [10:08]
Sam Jones
This is Boris, Boris Volodyarski. Today he's a historian specializing in Cold War spying and a filmmaker. Everything went well with the filming?
- [10:19]
Boris Volodyarski
Absolutely, absolutely. We're finishing, but still working hard day and night.
- [10:23]
Sam Jones
He's 70 and has a mildly exaggerated Anglophile pose to his dress. Bow ties and waistcoats and umbrellas and so on. Boris's film is a semi dramatized documentary. It's called Spy Capital Two and it's all about Jan Marsalek. So, like me, Boris has been spending a lot of time trying to get into Marsalek'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.
- [10:58]
Boris Volodyarski
It's very simple. Concerning my rather short participation with the Russian special forces, which I was in office of Spetsnaz, what is called normally Inter west sleeper agents.
- [11:11]
Sam Jones
So if anyone is going to be able to credibly interpret Marsalek's recruitment, perhaps it's Boris. 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?
- [11:53]
Boris Volodyarski
Oh, yes, I know definitely the first destination should have been Germany. And we started in Germany in every detail. And from Germany, after a couple of years in Germany, it was to be a transfer to England.
- [12:07]
Sam Jones
Boris spent six years training for this mission. He was turned into a lethal secret machine.
- [12:14]
Boris Volodyarski
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.
- [12:36]
Sam Jones
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?
- [12:48]
Boris Volodyarski
It was much less a kind of ideology or propaganda, but more of fun and interest in what you were going through and how you were trained.
- [13:02]
Sam Jones
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 Marsalek?
- [13:14]
Boris Volodyarski
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 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.
- [13:51]
Sam Jones
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.
- [14:08]
Boris Volodyarski
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.
- [14:16]
Sam Jones
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?
- [14:31]
Boris Volodyarski
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.
- [14:47]
Sam Jones
And of course that kind of weakness isn't only found in greedy businessmen.
- [14:52]
Boris Volodyarski
If we are talking about recruiting a journalist, for example, it would be somebody who would get access, suddenly get access to information, sensitive insider 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.
- [15:14]
Sam Jones
Now, I can't be certain, but I'm pretty sure that when I used to cover defence for the ft, I 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 hypervigilant, but even at the time I remember thinking Something felt slightly off. And it reminds me a little bit too of Marsalek 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 Maarsalek in Nice, I can tick off a lot of the factors that Boris mentions. By 2014, he'd been traveling 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, here was Jan Marsalek by this point, already secretly breaking the law, partying on a yacht with a Russian femme fatale 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 Polinski, 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 Marsalek.
- [17:00]
Boris Volodyarski
He never recruited Marsalek as presented in the media, in most of the newspapers, because it was not his job.
- [17:08]
Sam Jones
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.
- [17:22]
Boris Volodyarski
Absolutely no way. Absolutely 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 Marsolik.
- [17:44]
Sam Jones
I have some questions about Boris 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 GRU in the 1980s. Because as I understand Russia's modern intelligence agencies, their activities can be much less formalized, 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 Marsalek 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 minimize this scandal. What's your response to that?
- [18:36]
Boris Volodyarski
I am response to that. That I have not been a GIU officer in the past 30 years. On the contrary, I'm an intelligence historian who is writing books that are very, very much unlike in Russia. I am doing investigations. I'm 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 article myself, doing films that of course are very much negatively viewed at 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.
- [19:26]
Sam Jones
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 Marsalek didn't work for the Russians. He's just saying it's more complicated than that. Boris's interpretation is that Marsalek is not an agent, but what he describes as a collaborator, a kind of top tier freelancer.
- [19:56]
Boris Volodyarski
He thought that he could set up his own 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.
- [20:20]
Sam Jones
I think there's something in this idea. I don't get the impression that Marsalek 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 asked Boris, if Marsalek is a freelancer, why might he have wanted to work with Stas, with Russia?
- [21:09]
Boris Volodyarski
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 or to the British intelligence or to the Russian intelligence, he psychologically, politically and ideologically would probably choose Russia rather than Britain.
- [21:35]
Sam Jones
Why do you think that is?
- [21:37]
Boris Volodyarski
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.
- [21:54]
Sam Jones
It's a sort of freedom of privilege. It's a freedom to break a few rules and not be put in jail, that kind of thing.
- [22:02]
Boris Volodyarski
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.
- [22:15]
Sam Jones
Mulling over what Boris has said, the zill lanes in Moscow come to mind. They're segregated lanes in Moscow's big arterial roads, reserved for the use of the nomenclatura, 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. Marsalek 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 Marsalek's old classmates in Kloster. Neuberg 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 it's actual warmongering. For a long time, I struggled to understand how Marsalek 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 Marsalek's affinity for Russia might have come from.
- [23:56]
Host
I was struck because there was one dimension missing here.
- [24:02]
Sam Jones
That's coming up after the. After the FT first outed Marsalek 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 Marsalek story that no one else had noticed.
- [24:33]
Host
So far, everybody was 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.
- [24:58]
Sam Jones
Thomas 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.
- [25:09]
Host
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?
- [25:31]
Sam Jones
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.
- [26:49]
Host
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.
- [27:03]
Sam Jones
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.
- [27:17]
Host
His grandfather. Hans Marscalek is a very prominent figure in Austria because he survived a term in the concentration camp at Mauthausen. He 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.
- [27:44]
Sam Jones
Hans Marsalek 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 Mauthausen 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.
- [28:16]
Host
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 Marschalek. And then I thought, okay, I might try my luck and get to the archives and ask if there is a dossier on Hans Marschelik. 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 Marschalek.
- [28:52]
Sam Jones
Thomas still has the records and he's brought them out to show me. And it's yeah, it's 1, 2, 3 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 Dringender Verdagt, the urgent suspicion that Marsalek 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 Marsalek 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 Marsalek, 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.
- [30:12]
Host
Of course, this rich personal history. This man must have had an influence on Jan Marshalek, especially when it comes to his fascination with the secret world.
- [30:26]
Sam Jones
We can't know. But to me it's a. 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. Yan 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.
- [31:02]
Host
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 Marschalek and that he cultivated him as a source.
- [31:30]
Sam Jones
Thomas is saying that not only was Jan Marsalek'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 more than a coincidence? Do these kind of things only happen because almost they were meant to happen?
- [32:09]
Host
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.
- [32:28]
Sam Jones
I mean, that's not too fanciful.
- [32:32]
Host
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.
- [32:46]
Sam Jones
It's hard to weigh the significance of all this, because ultimately I can't tell you what Jan Marsalek 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 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 realized 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'd 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.
- [33:38]
Host
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.
- [34:06]
Sam Jones
How would you describe this new ideological fault line? What is it?
- [34:12]
Host
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.
- [34:35]
Sam Jones
Maybe ideology is a bit of a misnomer. I think the German word Weltanschaung is kind of better. Here it means worldview. The subtle difference being that Weltanchauung 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, 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 Marsalek, 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, something you feel pick up over time. It's something that inspires you to act. Coming up next time on Hot Money.
- [36:11]
Boris Volodyarski
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.
- [36:26]
Sam Jones
Now this sort of shows that they both have a common employer, which is Jan Marcella.
- [36:31]
Paul Murphy
They were all plotting together exactly from.
- [36:34]
Boris Volodyarski
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.
- [36:54]
Sam Jones
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 d' Oliveira with additional sound design by Izzy Carter. Original music from Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphonet. Our show art is by Sean Carney. Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley, Amy Gaines, McQuaid and Matthew Garaghan. Additional editing by Paul Murphy. Special thanks to rula Khalaf, Dan McCrum, Laura Clark, Alistair Mackey, Manuel Zaragoza, Nigel Hansen, Vicky Merrick, Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Jake Flanagan, Jacob Goldstein, Sarah Nix and Greta Cohn. I'm Sam Jones. Foreign I want to take a moment to thank you for being a Pushkin plus subscriber. I hope you're enjoying hot money. Be sure to take advantage of all Pushkin plus has to offer, including ad free access to all Pushkin shows, bonus episodes, early access, exclusive binges, and full audiobooks after this episode.
- [38:30]
Host
This is an iHeart podcast.