← Hot Money: Agent of Chaos
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- [00:00]
Sam Jones
This is an Iheart podcast.
- [00:04]
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- [02:21]
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- [03:07]
Chris Donnelly
Pushkin.
- [03:17]
Sam Jones
Pushkin. Previously on Hot Money. First of all, I thought someone might have been murdered, but I did think.
- [03:29]
Paul Murphy
Well, there's no ambulances or anything, and.
- [03:31]
Sam Jones
There'S no police cars.
- [03:33]
Paul Murphy
And then I saw these men or women all blacked out with balaclavas on.
- [03:40]
Helen Worrell
Marslik really was like a sort of ghost that haunted this trial. He was clearly the organizing mind and he was there in black and white. Telegram messages.
- [03:59]
Unnamed Analyst
If I was a border control guard, though, I would notice the expiry date on that check. Passport. Passports never last more than 10 years, do they?
- [04:09]
Chris Donnelly
Right?
- [04:09]
Sam Jones
I mean, I don't. Is. I didn't. I didn't know that.
- [04:11]
Unnamed Analyst
That doesn't look right.
- [04:14]
Sam Jones
I'm back with Paul Murphy, my old editor and the person who first put me onto the Jan Marsalek story. And I've brought copies of some identity documents, passports, and a few photos. Konstantin Vladimirovich Bayazov. I've got a picture of him here dressed in a kind of very ornate gold Orthodox priest's kind of mantle, carrying a candle. Oh, no, it's not a candle. It's a chalice covered with a cloth. Looks like a sort of slightly more weathered Marsalek. But they do look similar. Similar kind of face shape.
- [04:48]
Unnamed Analyst
You do, actually. Yeah.
- [04:50]
Sam Jones
So basically he's nicked his identity.
- [04:52]
Unnamed Analyst
If he's traveling to places like Dubai as a Russian Orthodox priest, that's going to kind of crimp his operation.
- [05:03]
Sam Jones
I have no idea if Marsalek actually traveled anywhere dressed in the full vestments of the Russian Orthodox Church, but I do know this is one of the identities he's been using in recent years. And there are plenty more. Some are from real people, some are names that are completely made up. A Frenchman from Strasbourg, Alexandre Schmidt. And a Belgian of the same name, an Austrian, Max Maurer. I've also had tips about a possible Israeli identity, even a Namibian one.
- [05:33]
Unnamed Analyst
I noticed that he's. He's lopped a couple of years off his age.
- [05:38]
Sam Jones
On which one?
- [05:39]
Unnamed Analyst
The Belgian driving license saying he's born in 82. He wasn't. He was born in 1980.
- [05:50]
Sam Jones
For much of the last few years, figuring out ways to conceal his identity has really been the major preoccupation for Marsalek. Disappearing in an age of ubiquitous CCTV and now facial recognition software. It's no easy task. So much so that he's even told people he's had plastic surgery. And yet, despite being one of the world's most wanted men, Marsalek has managed to maintain allies in countries all over the world. I've already told you about his networks in Austria, the UK and Libya. But his connections actually reach much further, something brought into focus by the reams of messages that were revealed through the case of the Bulgarian spy ring. The trial we heard about in the last episode. Those messages show that Marsilek has a network of business contacts, corrupt officials and pals that spans the globe. And there's one particular network that I want to discuss with Paul. And actually, you know, information came to us really well at the end of the trial that that kind of points to the fact that this network of his around the world, it might include some contacts that are a lot more surprising than any we've found out about so far. I'm intrigued because Jan Marsalek, he's someone who's dedicated himself to acting in Russia's interests, working in the shadows to push the Kremlin's agenda. But not exclusively. I'm Sam Jones from the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries. This is hot money. Season 3 Agent of Chaos Episode 8 Matryoshka Great. Thanks again for picking us up.
- [07:47]
Chris Donnelly
Oh, a pleasure. SatNav takes you to a field about half a mile.
- [07:55]
Sam Jones
Before we get to Marslek's wider network, there's someone I knew I needed to speak to, someone who can help me understand what Russia really wants and why an agent like Jan Marsalek is the perfect fit. Chris Donnelly lives in a remote corner of Britain. My producer, Peggy, and I traveled there to meet him. Chris is a respected Kremlin analyst, a cold warrior, and at 79, Chris still finds himself a personal target for Russia. His house burned down under mysterious circumstances several years ago, and as a result, he's still regularly in contact with Special Branch, the unit of the UK's police, who handles sensitive political cases about possible ongoing threats to him, still really is an issue.
- [08:47]
Chris Donnelly
The police have the house under storm alert. We've got security systems.
- [08:52]
Sam Jones
Right, Right.
- [08:53]
Chris Donnelly
We're not sure what, you know, how it came to burn down.
- [08:56]
Sam Jones
We're sitting in the drawing room of Chris's ancient manor house. Through the window are views across rolling hills to distant peaks. Chris has offered us a glass of dry white wine while his wife gets an omelette lunch ready in their big farmhouse kitchen. The contrast between what we're Here to talk about the very English romance of the setting and Chris's quiet, generous hospitality is almost surreal. And not for the first time in this series. I feel the thinness of the boundary between the conventions of spy fact and fiction. Especially when he tells me how all this started for him. Back when he was 22 years old, Chris was studying for a Russian language degree and had a desire to really immerse himself in the country. On his second visit there, his idealism met with the reality of Russian power head on. It was 1968.
- [09:51]
Chris Donnelly
I drove my Mini there with a colleague and we ended up being arrested and put on trial and thrown out the country.
- [09:58]
Sam Jones
Wow.
- [09:59]
Chris Donnelly
You driven your Mini to Moscow and then from Moscow down to the Caucasus and then from the Caucasus into Ukraine and wonder why all the roads are full of tanks.
- [10:10]
Sam Jones
Chris had inadvertently driven his Mini Cooper into one of the defining events of the Cold War, a crackdown that would forever change the reputation of the Soviet Union. Those tanks were on their way to Czechoslovakia to unseat the country's government and stop its liberal reforms.
- [10:31]
Chris Donnelly
From the Russian point of view, it was obvious we were there to spy on the tanks. From our point of view, there were just obstacles in the way of our driving. We didn't know what was going on.
- [10:41]
Sam Jones
Blimey. Okay. What was. Must have been a bit of a hair raising experience.
- [10:47]
Chris Donnelly
It makes you think and it set me on a course of wanting to understand the mentality and why and how Russians think differently.
- [11:01]
Sam Jones
Chris tells me he spent a week in jail in Odessa before the Russians sent him home. He would go on to become one of the most respected Russia watchers in the West. He taught for years at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and his expertise meant he would eventually advise the leaders of Western governments on Russia and how to handle it. And then 1989 came. By then, Chris was working for NATO. He'd heard that something was going on at the border between west and East Germany, so he drove there to see it for himself. And what he witnessed, it's an image that has stayed with him vividly ever since. A family leaving East Germany, the first time they were free to do that in decades.
- [11:50]
Chris Donnelly
A family of five stuffed inside a Trabant, which is something smaller than a Minion, made of cardboard with a two stroke three cylinder engine. They then moved through the gates and out into Germany. They were suddenly surrounded by a thousand people waiting for them. We pulled her out of the car, kissed him, gave her money. I thought, it's happened, there's no control of this.
- [12:29]
Sam Jones
I can see exactly why this makes Chris, well, up to this day, his whole adult life, he dedicated himself to trying to understand and fight this huge repressive regime. And suddenly, in a blink, it was tumbling apart, all captured in that one single human moment of a solitary car, a single family driving to their freedom, being welcomed by thousands of fellow Germans they'd been forcibly separated from all their lives. Chris, like almost everyone thought the fall of the Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union that followed was the beginning of a new world. But in Russia itself, change brought chaos. And in the dying days of the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, Putin and his people began to come out of the shadows.
- [13:21]
Chris Donnelly
So these guys are not politicians in the Western sense of people who have risen through political party processes. They are former intelligence officers and. And military people with an intelligence war mindset. A war mindset who have now turned the tradecraft of the KGB into the statecraft of the Russian state.
- [13:46]
Sam Jones
A mindset that began all the way back in 1917 when the Russian Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power and has endured ever since, because the whole Russian.
- [13:57]
Chris Donnelly
System remained on a war footing and never moved to a peacetime footing because it lived with this understanding that the world was hostile. All the outside world is hostile, everyone's an enemy, and we might have to fight.
- [14:15]
Sam Jones
As Chris tells me more about how Russia thinks about war, I begin to better grasp the plots that Jan Marsalek organized to better understand how they fit into a Russian strategy and what the principles of that strategy are.
- [14:30]
Chris Donnelly
So the first principle of war in Russia is surprise. It's actually suddenness. The second principle, activenest. Keep moving, keep them off balance. The third principle is hide what you do because there's no ground to hide behind, no hills or valleys to. To move up in secret.
- [14:55]
Sam Jones
Many of these principles, as Chris explains, can be traced right back to things as simple as the geography of Russia itself. Like that last one. Your forces need to mask their intentions through psychological tricks because they can't rely on the environment, the flat, open terrain, to hide them.
- [15:15]
Chris Donnelly
You're all in the open, so you have to be deceitful in the good sense of the term. Then, Kiem Operatsi this the tempo of the operation. You've got to keep the whole thing moving at a large scale and not get bogged down. You don't know where the enemy is. So Razvid Kaboyam, reconnaissance by battle. You actually attack the enemy to find out what he's going to do, because he doesn't know either. So the intelligence can't do that. So everything's proactive. Starting from your basic principles.
- [15:48]
Sam Jones
You don't need to worry about staying hidden if you can confuse, you don't need to be careful if you can be fast. And with all of this, you can give your operatives. You want to give your operatives a whole load of freedom to make decisions. You let them succeed or fail based on their own merits. You just set an overarching objective and then let your agents see how far they can push things.
- [16:14]
Chris Donnelly
You're giving the guys free license to go and attack what they can and destroy it. As long as they maintain that main aim. The mentality is coherent throughout the whole approach, they make sense.
- [16:27]
Sam Jones
To a Western intelligence agency, it might look reckless to cultivate an agent like Marsalek, the author of a massive fraud, with an appetite for the high life and a penchant for games and mystery. But to the gru, Russia's military intelligence agency, an organization primed to test constantly for points of weakness, to act unexpectedly, and to push, push and push in areas where it suddenly finds advantage. It makes total sense. Now, I do want to be clear that not all Russian intelligence is like this, but the GRU school of COVID action, it's the one that has really come to dominate Russian thinking in recent years. The GRU is having its moment. So would I mean, under that description, would you say that to take that kind of battlefield doctrine and apply it to European society at large, that we kind of got to a stage at one point where Russian intelligence had kind of broken through and was so successful, and then people would, yeah, just go and make a mess. Go and go and break things.
- [17:32]
Chris Donnelly
Yeah. The fact there is a controlling mind directing the attack doesn't mean to say that that mind is micromanaging with a long screwdriver for every little operation. You couldn't do it without slowing everything down.
- [17:51]
Sam Jones
I suppose it's a very different way of COVID action to what we might think of in the UK or the US Yeah.
- [18:00]
Chris Donnelly
One of the biggest differences is it carries with it a lot of risk, but in Russian terms, it's not unjustifiable risk. In war, you have to take risks, and you have to reward people for taking risks, and you have to let them make mistakes and learn from them. You have to have trial and error in war. At the moment, in the west, we have error and trial.
- [18:29]
Sam Jones
This all seems like it very neatly ties a bow on this story, that it helps us to understand Marsalek as the perfect Russian agent of chaos. Except, as I keep telling you spy stories, they tend to take unexpected turns. The more I delve into the telegram message hall, the one from the trial of the Bulgarians in London, the more I begin to feel that there's an important complication to all of this. Because Marsalek's relationship with the Russian state, it's not entirely straightforward, not entirely clear cut.
- [19:18]
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- [20:28]
Sam Jones
When I think of the most successful Russian spies of perfect agents. Being a Brit, there's someone who instantly comes to mind. Kim Philby, one of the most effective spies of the Cold War. A Russian mole right at the top of British intelligence for years. I don't mean to compare Marsalek to Philby in terms of what they did as spies, but just to observe that when Philby eventually had to flee to Moscow, he was given a hero's welcome, a new official life, a prestigious apartment. And that is not what appears to have happened to Jan Marsalek. Take all those passports Paul Murphy and I were looking at. When I went back to the messages between Jan Marsalek and Orlin Rusev, Marsalek's man in Great Yarmouth, the guy helping to run the Bulgarian spy ring, I started to see hints of a different narrative. We've asked a friend of the show to read Marsalek's messages.
- [21:27]
Paul Murphy
The good thing is the French guy even looks a bit like me. But we can change the name, right?
- [21:33]
Sam Jones
They spend a long time discussing how to make this passport look real. And they talk about their options to get others from R Select too. You see in the messages, while it's the plots and the schemes that are the marmalade droppers, it's Actually, the crumbs of meaning between the headline material that can open up a whole new perspective on things. So to me, the implication here is that Marsalek's escape to Russia isn't something that's been organized with official sanction. Because Russia's secret services don't seem to be automatically furnishing Jan Mars Lech with new documents, he's having to get them for himself through Rusev and sometimes struggling. And this isn't the only thing that tells me Marsalek's new life in Moscow is complicated. After Marsalek disappeared, I suppose we all thought that this 2 billion euro hole in Wirecard's accounts, at least some of it, must have been money plundered by him. But in reality, in Moscow at least early on, he seems to be having money problems. Here, he tells Rusev about his wrangles with the fsb, Russia's main domestic intelligence agency.
- [22:47]
Paul Murphy
Sorry, I was fighting the whole day today with the cash crypto guy and the FSB f ing mess.
- [22:54]
Sam Jones
He and Rusev discuss in dozens and dozens of messages how we might open a bank account in Russia, which is near impossible without official documents. They talk about how they might use crypto brokers to try and get money for him. Marsalek tells Rusev it's a media narrative, that he's got tens of millions stashed in Bitcoin. I asked my colleague Helen Worrell about what she made of all of this because she covered the trial for the ft, but also because she spent many years covering intelligence and security.
- [23:24]
Helen Worrell
He talks about at one point that the FSB having to approve his cleaning lady. So, you know, there's obviously lots of sort of domestic issues. You know, almost every part of his life is somehow constrained and overseen. And you get the impression that he's constantly trying to prove his use to the FSB in the GRU in a way that sort of seems slightly exhausting and also quite kind of needy. You can see that he's sort of bridling against the idea that he's in captivity here. Before, obviously, he became, you know, wanted person by Germany and Interpol, he led this very international life. And there are signs that he's trying to sort of get back to that, albeit in quite a constrained way.
- [24:10]
Sam Jones
What all of this says to me is that Marslek is not an on the books agent, someone who is controlled by Russian intelligence in a formalised way. And it seems he's even having to work hard to justify his host's continued protection. But maybe there's a Flip side to having a less structured relationship with the Russian state. A little bit more freedom to pursue your own interests where you can anyway. In June 2021, for example, Marsalek began discussing a new scheme with Rusev. The Russian state will need to be.
- [24:46]
Paul Murphy
Kept informed and waiting for input from.
- [24:49]
Sam Jones
Our friends and indeed they will be a client in this scheme. But the scheme primarily will be a money making operation with Marsalek and Rusev as the middlemen to sell arms to clients in Africa. Rusev tells Marsalek his contacts want to spend up to $60 million on guns and other weapons. He's already organized a test run for the route, he says via Dubai. They will be paying in diamonds.
- [25:15]
Paul Murphy
Fancy rebels.
- [25:17]
Sam Jones
Marsalek evidently sense a further opportunity. If they can not just transport the arms, but but also sell them themselves.
- [25:24]
Paul Murphy
Do they have a supplier for the guns and vehicles or can we become an end to end supplier? We can also provide training if needed.
- [25:32]
Sam Jones
Neither of them cares who these weapons are going to. Marsalek asks if it's a government backed force and Rusev replies, who knows? Then the letters tia, which stands for this is Africa. It's a quote he likes to use, he tells Marsalek from the movie Blood Diamond. This kind of scheme, it's not a one off. Marslek is also involved in setting up a backchannel to get weaponry from China to Russia. Drones for example, or ways to smuggle microchips into the country too.
- [26:06]
Helen Worrell
I mean, I would say that the things that involve making money are things that Rusev and Marslet come up between themselves, sort of brokering arms deals, you know, trying to get weapons from China to Russia to help on the Ukraine battlefields in a kind of deniable way. So I would say their money making schemes are things that they suggest rather than things that come down from the top.
- [26:29]
Sam Jones
And many of these schemes involve offering kickbacks to men at the GRU and the FSB in order to get them off the ground. As Marsalek tells Rusev his new life.
- [26:39]
Paul Murphy
In Russia, it's like a Russian matrioshka doll of motivations within secret ambitions.
- [26:50]
Sam Jones
You may have had a Russian matryoshka doll when you were a kid. They're those wooden dolls that have a series of slightly smaller dolls within them. Marslec reportedly had a set in his office featuring great Russian leaders past and present. The novelty is, I suppose, that you're never sure when you've reached the innermost doll, the core of something in this story. I've sometimes had the feeling that we never Will that with Jan Marsalek and his many Personas, the surprises will just keep coming. Even so, I wasn't quite prepared for the next one, which came to light at the end of the Bulgarian trial. At their sentencing in May, all in Rusev appeared in court to be sentenced. At the outset of the trial, he had pled guilty, but his lawyer had a wild card to play a plea for mitigation.
- [27:49]
Helen Worrell
This was a very surprising development, I have to say. It was also, I would say, quite a sort of bold and risky gambit by Rousseff's lawyer. He essentially told the court that Marsalek had received a request from the CIA to help airlift some US personnel from Kabul during the military withdrawal in August of 2021.
- [28:21]
Sam Jones
So that is quite the claim. Marsalek, contracting for the CIA, working on demand for the arch nemesis of his Russian paymasters. Rousseff's defence made the case that getting Americans out of Kabul was a humanitarian action and showed that he deserved a more lenient sentence because he had been willing to help out Western interests too, when it was a question of saving people's lives. You might recall the situation after nearly 20 years. The US military was withdrawing from Afghanistan. But the final months of that process were chaotic. The Taliban unexpectedly surged towards Kabul, the capital. Thousands of Westerners and many Afghanis who had worked with them were desperate to flee and there simply weren't enough flights out of the country. The prosecution told the judge that Roussev's whole argument was wrong. Firstly, they said there was no evidence that the CIA ever made such a request. And second, they poured cold water on the idea that Roussev had some kind of humanitarian conscience at his centre.
- [29:28]
Helen Worrell
I mean, obviously the prosecution came back absolutely full throttle against this, as in.
- [29:34]
Sam Jones
They really tried to slap it down.
- [29:36]
Helen Worrell
They did and, you know, they said, look, this is not evidence of a humanitarian motivation. It just shows that these people were motivated by money and they do whatever work was necessary by whoever was prepared to pay them. And, you know, the idea that somehow they were as happy to work for the CIA as they were for the GRU or the FSB was, was sort of a misleading idea.
- [30:02]
Sam Jones
The thing is, though, this wild claim about the airlift made by the defence barrister in court, it's all there in black and white in the telegram messages between Rusev and Marsalek from the time.
- [30:16]
Paul Murphy
Interesting request from our sort of friends at the CIA.
- [30:20]
Sam Jones
This is Marsalek writing to Roussev on August 17, 2021, three days after the evacuation of Kabul began.
- [30:28]
Paul Murphy
They Urgently need aircraft to fly out contractors from Afghanistan. Apparently all dodgy airlift companies in Russia and Turkey etc are already sold out or refuse to fly because insurance won't cover the loss of an aircraft. Do you know anyone who's a bit rogue and operates large scale airplanes now?
- [30:48]
Sam Jones
Rusev. He does know people who can fly planes. He replies that his father operated as a pilot of fortune for years and has lots of experience in, quote, exotic locations like running guns into Africa. He writes, it will be tricky though. Rousseff tells Marsalek the situation on the ground in Afghanistan is a nightmare. Marsalek replies, america needs you.
- [31:13]
Paul Murphy
Pax Americana rests on your broad and manly shoulders.
- [31:18]
Sam Jones
There's evidently some tongue in cheek here, but the telegram messages, the more of them I read, the less they seem like a joke. There's so much detail here. They discuss plane types, costs, timing, permissions for landings and airspace access.
- [31:33]
Paul Murphy
Just discussing with the Americans. Apparently since 11am today, the airport is okay and 15 military aircraft took off today. But it can change any moment.
- [31:46]
Sam Jones
I can't tell you what did or didn't happen in Kabul regarding these flights in the end, but I have three hypotheses. One, Marsalek has himself been duped. The people he's talking to aren't really anything to do with the CIA. Two, he's lying, either because he's trying to impress Rusev or because it's part of some disinformation ploy. Or three, it's true, he really was trying to set up flights for people at the CIA, or at least people close to it. But then something else came to mind, something which happened way back in the winter of 2018. Paul, do you. Do you remember the uncles?
- [32:34]
Unnamed Analyst
I do.
- [32:36]
Sam Jones
I'm chatting with Paul Murphy again, my former editor, about a lead we had been given about Marsalek at the time. We set it aside because it was just a single fleck of evidence and frankly, we had our hands full.
- [32:51]
Unnamed Analyst
We were at that point of intense coverage of the wirecard fraud story, and suddenly, out of the blue, I got an email from somebody anonymously saying that they had been looped into an email conversation accidentally. And I might be interested in the.
- [33:12]
Sam Jones
Content being looped in. As in someone had typed the wrong email address and they had sent it to them.
- [33:18]
Unnamed Analyst
Precisely.
- [33:19]
Sam Jones
Precisely that the person who accidentally received this chain of emails was a software engineer based in Hong Kong. Paul dispatched a reporter to meet this person. The software engineer didn't want to forward the emails electronically, so they gave the reporter hard copies and the reporter faxed.
- [33:38]
Unnamed Analyst
Them to Paul, and they're quite extraordinary. It was a series of emails between a group of, I assume, men who refer to themselves as the Uncles, and they were talking to Jan, who had been put in touch with them to get advice on a particular challenge.
- [34:01]
Sam Jones
Paul and I dug up the emails. Here's the first message Jan Marsalek sends to the Uncles.
- [34:06]
Unnamed Analyst
Gentlemen, it is a great pleasure meeting you. Exclamation mark. Our mutual friend speaks very highly of you, and I look forward to meeting you in person one day. Thank you for introducing us and your kind introductory words.
- [34:21]
Sam Jones
Marcelette goes on to explain why he's getting in touch. He needs help with a project he's working on, an attempt to move the Austrian Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
- [34:31]
Unnamed Analyst
It's been suggested that you may be able to provide us with advice on how to establish an informal channel to explore the United States position on the subject and to provide guidance on how to navigate the complexities of the issue within the international community. Also, any assistance in shaping the domestic dialogue on the subject in Austria would be appreciated.
- [34:58]
Sam Jones
Suffice to say that moving embassies in Israel has become a symbolic issue for some parts of the far right in both Austria and the US with that in mind, the big question is, who are the Uncles?
- [35:14]
Unnamed Analyst
There are kind of whatever, five or six email addresses, all Proton mail addresses. We were able to identify a number.
- [35:27]
Sam Jones
Of these because there's sort of giveaway snippets of information in the emails themselves that allow us to assign identities to these. These different people in this. In this email chain. Right. With a relatively high degree of confidence of who they are. And we don't want to mention them for legal reasons at this stage, but, I mean, you can tell us about who. Who these kind of people are, what kind of world they move in.
- [35:54]
Unnamed Analyst
Okay, so one of them is a very senior former CIA officer, somebody who oversaw active operations in a certain theater of war. Another one is a former U.S. ambassador. We're talking here about people who are basically ex US Military, ex US Intelligence, all talking together online and calling themselves as a group, the Uncles. The fact is, we didn't know what to make of this at the time.
- [36:32]
Sam Jones
No, it was just so weird because, you know, we thought, okay, we've got other stuff on our plate, and this is so tangential to what we're doing. And then seven years later, the messages about this airlift in Kabul came to light, and I began to wonder whether there was some kind of network here after all, a group with links to the CIA that Marsalek had somehow found his way into maybe a group who shared some particular geopolitical views on the world and values this great line. Let's please remember that we should also pay some attention to financial opportunities while you all play your Game of Thrones, which encapsulates for me the kind of like this, this kind of weird world that these people are in where they are simultaneously looking for opportunities to make money through corruption and, you know, dodgy dealing business. And also they're looking to kind of, you know, exert geopolitical leverage and change through informal means, through back channels, through. Through people like Jan Marsalek.
- [37:38]
Unnamed Analyst
There's a real sense here that Jan was actually knitted into this group.
- [37:44]
Sam Jones
Yeah, what we don't have is any, you know, huge trove of evidence, but what we do have is kind of an intuition that there's something here. There's the shadow of some kind of network or world or, you know, group of people that crosses countries that Marslek is involved with. And this isn't just a Russia thing anymore. When I think of many of the people I've learned about, as I've reported on this series, people who've been cultivated by Marsalek and who have cultivated him, money, power and risk, those seem to be what motivates them all. But actually something else I think is behind the pursuit of those things. The key, something we've been bumping up against for this entire series, disdain for the way the ordinary world operates, for living by the rules, being limited by them. I mean this both as a psychological characteristic, but also as a broader political one that you might better describe as anti establishmentism, a political belief that things need to be undermined, broken. For Jan Marsalek, I've come to understand this as a big part of his view of the world. A gifted, if flawed young man, but someone whose pursuit of what made him different fed a deep cynicism about what he saw as the pieties of the world most people lived in. And he sought out worlds that seemed to expose that. A payment processing company making its money from gambling and porn, the ease of establishing a vast international fraud, and of course, spying. It's one of the biggest seductions of spying that you're inducted into a secret club. The people who really run the world, people who make decisions and don't have to follow the normal moral rules of society. When I first heard about Jan Marsalek, I felt he was the key to understanding something about Russia, the country that first lured him in. A country whose government had turned disdain against the liberal world order into its entire mode of statecraft. But actually what I now think is that it's not just a story about Russia, it's a story about us too. Because this disdain, this anger against the establishment, it's spread. It's no longer something in the shadowy world of crime and clandestine political networks. It's a political force. It's a way of doing business. Funnily enough, I think it was Cillian Kleinschmitt, who we met in Tunisia, who first latched onto this notion. Fitting, I suppose, given that he was the first to give me an insight into the destructive life of Jan Marsalek.
- [40:58]
Chris Donnelly
That's his kick, that's his adrenaline. It's like playing a video game or something. The rules based world is increasingly collapsing, so it gives also more and more space for this. That's what has been happening over the last few years.
- [41:15]
Sam Jones
So it's kind of. It's Jan's world out there.
- [41:19]
Chris Donnelly
The Jan's world becomes the normal.
- [41:23]
Sam Jones
Marsalek and people like him. They are agents of chaos. They're playing a game against the world they were born into. And they're winning. Foreign 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 Maureen 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 Macchi, Manuele Saragossa, Nigel Hansen, Vicky Merrick. With special thanks to the Studio Audio Berlin and to James Morris, who read Jan Marsalek's messages, and Erich Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Jake Flanagan, Jacob Goldstein, Sarah Nix and Greta Cohn. Hi, I'm Sam Jones. 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. This is an Iheart podcast.