July 29, 2025 • 39 mins
In our season finale, Sam discovers a different narrative about Marsalek’s life in Russia. And a tip from long ago resurfaces.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin Pushkin previously on Hot Money. First of all, I
thought someone might have been murdered.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
But I did think, well, there's no ambulances or anything,
and there's no police cars.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
And then I saw these men or women or black
with oil clab was on.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Marzleck 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 in these telegram messages.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
If I was a border ConTroll guy, though, I would
notice the expiry date on that check per sport. Passports
never last more than ten years, do they?
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Right? I mean I don't. I didn't know that.
Speaker 4 (01:19):
That doesn't look right.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
I'm back with Paul Murphy, my old editor and the
person who first put me onto the Yan marceleg story,
and I've brought copies of some identity documents, passports, and
a few photos. Constantin Vladimirvitch Bayazov. I've got a picture
of him here dressed in a kind of very ornate
gold Orthodox priests kind of mantle, carrying a candle. Oh no,
(01:45):
it's not a candle. It's a chalice covered with a cloth.
Looks like a sort of slightly more weathered mar Select
but they do look similar, similar kind of face shape
you do, actually, yeah, So basically he's nicked his identity.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
He's traveling to places like Dubai as a Russian Orthodox
priest that's going to kind of crimp crimp for his operation.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
I have no idea if Marcelec 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, Alexandro Schmidt, and
a Belgian of the same name an Austrian Max Mauer.
(02:35):
I've also had tips about a possible Israeli identity, even
a Namibian one.
Speaker 4 (02:42):
I noticed that he's locked a couple of years off
his age on which one the Belgian driving license, saying
he's born in eighty two. He wasn't he born in
nineteen eighty.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
For much of the last few years, figuring out ways
to conceal his identity has really been the major preoccupation
for Marcelek. Disappearing in an age of ubiquitous cc TV
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,
(03:20):
Marcelek 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 bulgarianspiring the trial
we heard about in the last episode. Those messages show
(03:44):
that Marcelek 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 kind of points to the
(04:06):
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. Are intrigued
because Jan marcelect he's someone who's dedicated himself to acting
in Russia's interests, working in the shadows to push the
(04:27):
Kremlin's agenda, but not exclusively. I'm Sam Jones from the
Financial Times and Pushkin Industries. This is Hot Money. Season three,
Agent of Chaos, Episode eight, Matrioshka, great, thanks again for
(04:55):
picking us up your pleasure, Sat.
Speaker 5 (04:58):
That takes you to a field about half about.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
Before we get to mars Elect'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 Marselek is the perfect fit. Chris Donnelly
lives in a remote corner of Britain. My producer Peggy
and I traveled there to meet him.
Speaker 6 (05:24):
Hi.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
Chris is a respected Kremlin analyst, a cold warrior, and
at seventy nine, 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
(05:49):
who handles sensitive political cases. About possible ongoing threats to him.
Speaker 5 (05:55):
Still really is an issue. The police of the house
under storm alert. We've got security systems right. We're not
sure how it came to burn down.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
We're sitting in the drawing room of Chris's ancient manor house.
Through the window, our views across rolling hills to distant peaks.
Chris has offered us a glass of dry white wine,
while his wife gets an omelet 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
(06:26):
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 twenty two years old. Chris
was studying for a Russian language degree and had a
(06:47):
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 nineteen sixty eight.
Speaker 5 (06:59):
I drawn by Mini there with a colleague and we
ended up being arrested and put on trial and thrown
out of the country.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Wow, you'd driven your miss.
Speaker 5 (07:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Chris had inadvertently driven his Mini Cooper into one of
the defining events of the Cold War, the 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.
Speaker 5 (07:39):
From the Russian pature. It was obvious we were there
to spy on the tanks throughout. From our point of view,
they were just obstacles in the way of our driving.
We didn't know what was going on.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
BlimE me, okay, what must have been a bit of
a hair raising experience.
Speaker 5 (07:55):
It makes you think, and it set me on a
course of wanting to understand the mentality and why and
how Russians think differently.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
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 nineteen eighty nine came by.
(08:38):
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.
Speaker 5 (08:58):
A family of five stuffed in Tyler trebant, which is
something smaller in a minion made of carbos was a
two stort three silans ranger. They then moved through the
gates and out into Germany. They were suddenly surrounded by
(09:19):
a thousand people. Where to for him? Who pulled out
of the artistic Yeah, have money, it's happened. There's no
control of this.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
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
(10:02):
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
(10:23):
of the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, Putin and his people
began to come out of the shadows.
Speaker 5 (10:29):
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 military people with an intelligence
war mindset, a war mindset who have now turned the
(10:50):
tradecraft of the KGB into the statecraft of the Russian state.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
A mindset that began all the way back in nineteen
seventeen when the Russian Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power
and has endured ever since.
Speaker 5 (11:04):
Because the whole Russian system remained on a war foot
and never moved to a piece that I'm footing, because
it lived with this understanding that the world was hostile,
All the outside worlds hostile. Everyone's an enemy, and we
might have to fight. As Chris tells me more about
(11:25):
how Russia thinks about war. I begin to better grasp
the plots that yan Marcelek organized, to better understand how
they fit into a Russian strategy and what the principles
of that strategy are. So the first principle of war
in Russia is surprise. It's actually his aptness suddenness. The
(11:48):
second principle actipenist, keep moving, keep them off balance. The
third principle is masculovka. Hide what you do because there's
no ground to hide behind, no hills or valleys to
move up in a secret.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
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, maskudrovka. 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.
Speaker 5 (12:23):
You're all in the open, so you have to be
deceitful in the good sense of the term. Then camp,
perhapsly the temple 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 whether the nem is
or as vid Kuboi and reconnaissance. By battle, you actually
(12:45):
attack the enemy to find that what he's going to do,
because he doesn't know either, so intelligence can't do that.
So everything's proactive. Starting from your basic principles, you.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
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
(13:20):
can push things.
Speaker 5 (13:22):
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 applause. It makes sense.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
To a Western intelligence agency it might look reckless to
cultivate an agent like Marcelek, the author of a massive fraud,
with an appetite for the high life and a ponchon
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
(13:58):
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 g
are you school of covert action, it's the one that
has really come to dominate Russian thinking in recent years.
The GIU is having its moment. So would I mean
(14:20):
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 just
go and make a mess, go and go and break things.
Speaker 5 (14:40):
Yeah. The fact that there's a controlling mind directing the attack
doesn't mean to say that that mind is micromanaging with
a long screw dirie for every little operation. You couldn't
do it, not without flowing everything down.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
I suppose it's a very different way of covert action
to what we might think of in the UK or
the US.
Speaker 5 (15:08):
Yeah, the biggest difference is is it carries me. It's
a lot of risk, but in Russian terms, it's not
unjustifiable risks. 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.
(15:31):
You have to have trial and error in one. At
the moment in the West we have error and trial.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
This all seems like it very neatly ties a bow
on this story, that it helps us to understand Marceilex
as the perfect Russian agent of chaos. Except as I
keep telling you spy stories, they tend to take unexpected terms.
And the more I delve into the telegram message hall,
the one from the trial of the Bulgarians in London,
(15:59):
the more I begin to feel that there's an important
complication to all of this. Because marcele x relationship with
the Russian state, it's not entirely straightforward, not entirely to
clear cut. When I think of the most successful Russian spies,
(16:33):
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 mass selector Philby in terms of what they
did as spies, but just to observe that when Philby
(16:55):
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 Yan
mars elect Take all those passports Paul Murphy and I
were looking at. When I went back to the messages
between Yan Marcelek and Orlin Russev marcelexx man in Great Yarmouth,
(17:18):
the guy helping to run the bulgarianspiring, I started to
see hints of a different narrative. We've asked a friend
of the show to read Marcelex's messages.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
The good thing is that French guy even looks a
bit like me, but we can change the name right.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
They spend a long time discussing how to make this
passport look real, and they talk about their options to
get others for Marcelec 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
(17:59):
Marcei Lex 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 yan Malect 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 Marcelect's
(18:20):
new life in Moscow is complicated. After mar Select disappeared,
I suppose we all thought that this two billion euro
hole in wire cards 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
(18:40):
having money problems. Here he tells Rusev about his wrangles
with the FSB, Russia's main domestic intelligence agency.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Sorry, I was fighting the whole day today with the
cash crypto guy and the FSB.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Effing mess 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. Marcea Lect tells Russev it's a media
narrative that he's got tens of millions stashed in bitcoin.
(19:16):
I ask my colleague Kellen Warrel about what she made
of all of this, because she covered the trial for
the ft, but also because she's spent many years covering
intelligence and security.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
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 and the GRU in a
(19:48):
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 a wanted person by Germany and Interpol.
He led this very international lifestyle, and there are signs
that he's trying to sort of get back to that
(20:09):
be in quite a constrained way.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
What all of this says to me is that Marcelek
is not on the book's agent, someone who is controlled
by Russian intelligence in a formalized 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
(20:34):
bit more freedom to pursue your own interests where you
can anyway. In June twenty twenty one, for example, Marcelek
began discussing a new scheme with Rusev. The Russian state
will need to be kept informed.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
And waiting for input from our friends.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
And indeed they will be a client in this scheme.
That the scheme primarily will be a money making operation,
with Marcelek and Rusev as the middlemen to sell arms
to clients in Africa. Rusev tells Marcelekt his contacts want
to spend up to sixty million guns and other weapons.
He's already organized a test run for the route, he
(21:13):
says via Dubai. They will be paying in diamonds fancy rebels.
Marcelek evidently sends a further opportunity if they can not
just transport the arms but also sell them themselves.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Do they have a supplier for the guns and vehicles
or can we become an end to end supplier which
you also provide training if needed.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Neither of them cares who these weapons are going to.
Marceelek asks if it's a government backed force, and Russev replies,
who knows. Then the letters TIA, which stands for this
is Africa. It's a quote he likes to use, he
tells Marcelek from the movie Blood Diamond. This kind of scheme,
(21:56):
It's not a one off. Marcelek is also involved in
setting up a back channel to get weaponry from China
to Russia, drones for example, or ways to smuggle microchips
into the country too.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
I mean, I would say that the things that involve
making money are things that ruceven Masslect 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 they're money making schemes are things that they suggest
(22:28):
rather than things that come down from the top.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
And many of these schemes involve offering kickbacks to men
that the GRU and the FSB in order to get
them off the ground. As Marcelek tells, Russev is new
life in Russia.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
It's like a Russian matriosh goa dol of motivations within
secret ambitions.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
You may have had a Russian matriosh Go dole when
you were a kid. They're those wooden dolls that have
a series of slightly smaller dolls within them. Marcelek reportedly
had a set in his office featuring great Russian leaders
past and present. The novelty is I suppose that you're
never sure, and you've reached the innermost doll, the core
of something in this story. I've sometimes had the feeling
(23:15):
that we never will that. With Anne Marcelek 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 Russerve appeared in court
(23:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
This was a very surprising development, I have to say.
It was also, I would say he quite a sort
of bold and risky gambit by Russev's lawyer. He essentially
told the court that Marslek had received a request from
CIA to help airlift some US personnel from Carbul during
(24:15):
the military withdrawal in the in August of twenty twenty one.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
So that is quite the claim Marcelek contracting for the CIA,
working on demand for the arch nemesis of his Russian paymasters.
Russev's defense made the case that getting Americans out of
Carbull 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
(24:46):
of saving people's lives. You might recall the situation. After
nearly twenty years, the US military was withdrawing from Afghanistan,
but the final months of that process were chaotic. The
Taliban unexpectedly surged towards Karbl, the capital. Thousands of Westerners
and many Afghanis who had worked with them were desperate
(25:07):
to flee, and there simply weren't enough flights out of
the country. The prosecution told the judge that Rusev'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 Roucev had
some kind of humanitarian conscience at his center.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
I mean, obviously the prosecution came back absolutely full throttle.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
Against this as they really tried to slap it down.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
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
(25:58):
the GRU or the FSB was sort of a misleading idea.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
The thing is, though, this wild claim about the airlift
made by the defense barrister in court, it's all there
in black and white in the telegram messages between Rusev
and Marsilek from the time.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
Interesting request from ours sort of friends at the CIA.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
This is Marcelek writing to Russev on August seventeenth, twenty
twenty one, three days after the evacuation of Carbel began.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
They urgently need aircraft to fly out contractors from Afghanistan. Apparently,
all dodgy airlift companies in Russia and Turkey, et cetera
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?
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Now, 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. Rusev tells Marcelek the situation on
the ground in Afghani Pistan is a nightmare. Marcelegg replies,
(27:13):
America needs you, Pax.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Americana rests on your broad and manly shoulders.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Just discussing with the Americans. Apparently since eleven am today
the airport is okay and fifteen military.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
Aircraft took off today.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
But it can change any moment.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
I can't tell you what did or didn't happen in
car Bull regarding these flights. In the end, but I
have three hypotheses. One, Marcelek 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
(28:12):
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 twenty eighteen. Paul,
do you remember the uncles? I do. I'm chatting with
(28:39):
Paul Murphy again, my former editor, about a lead we
had been given about Martlek. At the time, we set
it aside because it was just a single fleck of evidence,
and frankly, we had our hands full.
Speaker 4 (28:53):
We were at that point of intense coverage of the
wire card fraud story, and suddenly, out of the blue,
I got an email from somebody anonymously saying that they
had been looked into an email conversation accidentally, and I
(29:13):
might be interested in the content.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
Being looked in, as in, someone had typed the wrong
email address and they they had sent it to.
Speaker 4 (29:20):
Them precisely precisely.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
There 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 them to Paul.
Speaker 4 (29:41):
And quite extraordinary. It was a series of emails between
a group of I assume men who referred 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.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
Paul and I dug up the emails. Here's the first
message Jan Marcelex sends to the uncles. 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. Marcelett goes on to
(30:24):
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.
Speaker 4 (30:33):
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
(30:55):
shaping the domestic dialogue on the subject in Austria would
be appreciated. 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?
(31:16):
There are kind of whatever the five or six email
addresses all proton mail addresses. We were able to identify
a number of these.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Because there's 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 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
(31:52):
about who these kind of people are, what kind of
world they move in.
Speaker 4 (31:56):
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 US ambassador.
We're talking here about people who were basically x US military,
(32:19):
x 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.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
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 Carbul 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 marce Lek had somehow found his way into,
(32:58):
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. It's which
encapsulates for me the kind of like this, this kind
(33:19):
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
Yan Marcelek.
Speaker 4 (33:40):
There's a real sense here that Jan was actually knitted
into this group.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
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 Marcelek is involved with.
And this isn't just a Russia thing anymore. When I
(34:18):
think of many of the people I've learned about as
I've reported on this series, people who've been cultivated by
Marcelek 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.
(34:39):
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
(35:02):
anti establishmentism, a political belief that things need to be undermined, broken,
for Yan Marcelect, 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,
(35:28):
and he sought out worlds that seemed to expose that
a payment processing company making its money from gambling and
pawn 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
(35:50):
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 Yan Marcelect, I felt he
was the key to understanding something about Russia, the country
that first lured him, in country whose government had turned
(36:10):
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
(36:33):
of crime and clandestine political networks. It's a political force,
it's a way of doing business. Funnily enough, I think
it was Killian Kleinschmidt, who we met in Tunisia, who
first latched onto this notion fitting I suppose, given that
(36:55):
he was the first to give me an insight into
the destructive life of Jan Marselekt.
Speaker 6 (37:00):
That's his kick, that's his Adrinavin. It's like playing a video.
Speaker 4 (37:06):
Game or something.
Speaker 6 (37:08):
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 three years.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
So it's kind of it's Yan's world out there.
Speaker 6 (37:21):
The Yan's world becomes the normal.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
Marcelek 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. Hot Money is a production of The
(37:49):
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 Marine Saint. Our show is edited by Karen Shakerji,
fact check by Kira Levigne, sound design and mastering by
(38:13):
Jake Gorsky and Marcelo de Olivia, 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 Gains McQuaid and
Matthew Garahan. Additional editing by Paul Murphy. Special thanks to
(38:36):
Ruler Calaffe, Dan McCrumb, Laura Clark, Alistair Mackey, Manuela Saragosa,
Nigel Hanson, Vicki Merrick, with special thanks to the Studio
Audio Berlin and to James Morris who read Jan Marceleg's messages,
and Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Jake Flanagan, Jacob Goldstein, Sarah
(38:57):
Nix and Greta Cohne. I'm Sam Jones. I want to
take a moment to thank you for being a pushkin
Plus subscriber. I hope you are enjoying hot money. Be
sure to take advantage of all pushkin Plus has to offer,
(39:20):
including add free access to all pushkin shows, bonus episodes,
early access, exclusive binges, and full audiobooks. After this episode
Pushkin Pushkin previously on Hot Money. First of all, I
thought someone might have been murdered.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
But I did think, well, there's no ambulances or anything,
and there's no police cars.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
And then I saw these men or women or black
with oil clab was on.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Marzleck 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 in these telegram messages.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
If I was a border ConTroll guy, though, I would
notice the expiry date on that check per sport. Passports
never last more than ten years, do they?
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Right? I mean I don't. I didn't know that.
Speaker 4 (01:19):
That doesn't look right.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
I'm back with Paul Murphy, my old editor and the
person who first put me onto the Yan marceleg story,
and I've brought copies of some identity documents, passports, and
a few photos. Constantin Vladimirvitch Bayazov. I've got a picture
of him here dressed in a kind of very ornate
gold Orthodox priests kind of mantle, carrying a candle. Oh no,
(01:45):
it's not a candle. It's a chalice covered with a cloth.
Looks like a sort of slightly more weathered mar Select
but they do look similar, similar kind of face shape
you do, actually, yeah, So basically he's nicked his identity.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
He's traveling to places like Dubai as a Russian Orthodox
priest that's going to kind of crimp crimp for his operation.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
I have no idea if Marcelec 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, Alexandro Schmidt, and
a Belgian of the same name an Austrian Max Mauer.
(02:35):
I've also had tips about a possible Israeli identity, even
a Namibian one.
Speaker 4 (02:42):
I noticed that he's locked a couple of years off
his age on which one the Belgian driving license, saying
he's born in eighty two. He wasn't he born in
nineteen eighty.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
For much of the last few years, figuring out ways
to conceal his identity has really been the major preoccupation
for Marcelek. Disappearing in an age of ubiquitous cc TV
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,
(03:20):
Marcelek 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 bulgarianspiring the trial
we heard about in the last episode. Those messages show
(03:44):
that Marcelek 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 kind of points to the
(04:06):
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. Are intrigued
because Jan marcelect he's someone who's dedicated himself to acting
in Russia's interests, working in the shadows to push the
(04:27):
Kremlin's agenda, but not exclusively. I'm Sam Jones from the
Financial Times and Pushkin Industries. This is Hot Money. Season three,
Agent of Chaos, Episode eight, Matrioshka, great, thanks again for
(04:55):
picking us up your pleasure, Sat.
Speaker 5 (04:58):
That takes you to a field about half about.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
Before we get to mars Elect'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 Marselek is the perfect fit. Chris Donnelly
lives in a remote corner of Britain. My producer Peggy
and I traveled there to meet him.
Speaker 6 (05:24):
Hi.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
Chris is a respected Kremlin analyst, a cold warrior, and
at seventy nine, 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
(05:49):
who handles sensitive political cases. About possible ongoing threats to him.
Speaker 5 (05:55):
Still really is an issue. The police of the house
under storm alert. We've got security systems right. We're not
sure how it came to burn down.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
We're sitting in the drawing room of Chris's ancient manor house.
Through the window, our views across rolling hills to distant peaks.
Chris has offered us a glass of dry white wine,
while his wife gets an omelet 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
(06:26):
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 twenty two years old. Chris
was studying for a Russian language degree and had a
(06:47):
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 nineteen sixty eight.
Speaker 5 (06:59):
I drawn by Mini there with a colleague and we
ended up being arrested and put on trial and thrown
out of the country.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Wow, you'd driven your miss.
Speaker 5 (07:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Chris had inadvertently driven his Mini Cooper into one of
the defining events of the Cold War, the 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.
Speaker 5 (07:39):
From the Russian pature. It was obvious we were there
to spy on the tanks throughout. From our point of view,
they were just obstacles in the way of our driving.
We didn't know what was going on.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
BlimE me, okay, what must have been a bit of
a hair raising experience.
Speaker 5 (07:55):
It makes you think, and it set me on a
course of wanting to understand the mentality and why and
how Russians think differently.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
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 nineteen eighty nine came by.
(08:38):
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.
Speaker 5 (08:58):
A family of five stuffed in Tyler trebant, which is
something smaller in a minion made of carbos was a
two stort three silans ranger. They then moved through the
gates and out into Germany. They were suddenly surrounded by
(09:19):
a thousand people. Where to for him? Who pulled out
of the artistic Yeah, have money, it's happened. There's no
control of this.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
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
(10:02):
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
(10:23):
of the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, Putin and his people
began to come out of the shadows.
Speaker 5 (10:29):
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 military people with an intelligence
war mindset, a war mindset who have now turned the
(10:50):
tradecraft of the KGB into the statecraft of the Russian state.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
A mindset that began all the way back in nineteen
seventeen when the Russian Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power
and has endured ever since.
Speaker 5 (11:04):
Because the whole Russian system remained on a war foot
and never moved to a piece that I'm footing, because
it lived with this understanding that the world was hostile,
All the outside worlds hostile. Everyone's an enemy, and we
might have to fight. As Chris tells me more about
(11:25):
how Russia thinks about war. I begin to better grasp
the plots that yan Marcelek organized, to better understand how
they fit into a Russian strategy and what the principles
of that strategy are. So the first principle of war
in Russia is surprise. It's actually his aptness suddenness. The
(11:48):
second principle actipenist, keep moving, keep them off balance. The
third principle is masculovka. Hide what you do because there's
no ground to hide behind, no hills or valleys to
move up in a secret.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
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, maskudrovka. 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.
Speaker 5 (12:23):
You're all in the open, so you have to be
deceitful in the good sense of the term. Then camp,
perhapsly the temple 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 whether the nem is
or as vid Kuboi and reconnaissance. By battle, you actually
(12:45):
attack the enemy to find that what he's going to do,
because he doesn't know either, so intelligence can't do that.
So everything's proactive. Starting from your basic principles, you.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
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
(13:20):
can push things.
Speaker 5 (13:22):
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 applause. It makes sense.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
To a Western intelligence agency it might look reckless to
cultivate an agent like Marcelek, the author of a massive fraud,
with an appetite for the high life and a ponchon
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
(13:58):
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 g
are you school of covert action, it's the one that
has really come to dominate Russian thinking in recent years.
The GIU is having its moment. So would I mean
(14:20):
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 just
go and make a mess, go and go and break things.
Speaker 5 (14:40):
Yeah. The fact that there's a controlling mind directing the attack
doesn't mean to say that that mind is micromanaging with
a long screw dirie for every little operation. You couldn't
do it, not without flowing everything down.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
I suppose it's a very different way of covert action
to what we might think of in the UK or
the US.
Speaker 5 (15:08):
Yeah, the biggest difference is is it carries me. It's
a lot of risk, but in Russian terms, it's not
unjustifiable risks. 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.
(15:31):
You have to have trial and error in one. At
the moment in the West we have error and trial.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
This all seems like it very neatly ties a bow
on this story, that it helps us to understand Marceilex
as the perfect Russian agent of chaos. Except as I
keep telling you spy stories, they tend to take unexpected terms.
And the more I delve into the telegram message hall,
the one from the trial of the Bulgarians in London,
(15:59):
the more I begin to feel that there's an important
complication to all of this. Because marcele x relationship with
the Russian state, it's not entirely straightforward, not entirely to
clear cut. When I think of the most successful Russian spies,
(16:33):
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 mass selector Philby in terms of what they
did as spies, but just to observe that when Philby
(16:55):
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 Yan
mars elect Take all those passports Paul Murphy and I
were looking at. When I went back to the messages
between Yan Marcelek and Orlin Russev marcelexx man in Great Yarmouth,
(17:18):
the guy helping to run the bulgarianspiring, I started to
see hints of a different narrative. We've asked a friend
of the show to read Marcelex's messages.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
The good thing is that French guy even looks a
bit like me, but we can change the name right.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
They spend a long time discussing how to make this
passport look real, and they talk about their options to
get others for Marcelec 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
(17:59):
Marcei Lex 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 yan Malect 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 Marcelect's
(18:20):
new life in Moscow is complicated. After mar Select disappeared,
I suppose we all thought that this two billion euro
hole in wire cards 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
(18:40):
having money problems. Here he tells Rusev about his wrangles
with the FSB, Russia's main domestic intelligence agency.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Sorry, I was fighting the whole day today with the
cash crypto guy and the FSB.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Effing mess 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. Marcea Lect tells Russev it's a media
narrative that he's got tens of millions stashed in bitcoin.
(19:16):
I ask my colleague Kellen Warrel about what she made
of all of this, because she covered the trial for
the ft, but also because she's spent many years covering
intelligence and security.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
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 and the GRU in a
(19:48):
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 a wanted person by Germany and Interpol.
He led this very international lifestyle, and there are signs
that he's trying to sort of get back to that
(20:09):
be in quite a constrained way.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
What all of this says to me is that Marcelek
is not on the book's agent, someone who is controlled
by Russian intelligence in a formalized 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
(20:34):
bit more freedom to pursue your own interests where you
can anyway. In June twenty twenty one, for example, Marcelek
began discussing a new scheme with Rusev. The Russian state
will need to be kept informed.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
And waiting for input from our friends.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
And indeed they will be a client in this scheme.
That the scheme primarily will be a money making operation,
with Marcelek and Rusev as the middlemen to sell arms
to clients in Africa. Rusev tells Marcelekt his contacts want
to spend up to sixty million guns and other weapons.
He's already organized a test run for the route, he
(21:13):
says via Dubai. They will be paying in diamonds fancy rebels.
Marcelek evidently sends a further opportunity if they can not
just transport the arms but also sell them themselves.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Do they have a supplier for the guns and vehicles
or can we become an end to end supplier which
you also provide training if needed.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Neither of them cares who these weapons are going to.
Marceelek asks if it's a government backed force, and Russev replies,
who knows. Then the letters TIA, which stands for this
is Africa. It's a quote he likes to use, he
tells Marcelek from the movie Blood Diamond. This kind of scheme,
(21:56):
It's not a one off. Marcelek is also involved in
setting up a back channel to get weaponry from China
to Russia, drones for example, or ways to smuggle microchips
into the country too.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
I mean, I would say that the things that involve
making money are things that ruceven Masslect 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 they're money making schemes are things that they suggest
(22:28):
rather than things that come down from the top.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
And many of these schemes involve offering kickbacks to men
that the GRU and the FSB in order to get
them off the ground. As Marcelek tells, Russev is new
life in Russia.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
It's like a Russian matriosh goa dol of motivations within
secret ambitions.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
You may have had a Russian matriosh Go dole when
you were a kid. They're those wooden dolls that have
a series of slightly smaller dolls within them. Marcelek reportedly
had a set in his office featuring great Russian leaders
past and present. The novelty is I suppose that you're
never sure, and you've reached the innermost doll, the core
of something in this story. I've sometimes had the feeling
(23:15):
that we never will that. With Anne Marcelek 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 Russerve appeared in court
(23:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
This was a very surprising development, I have to say.
It was also, I would say he quite a sort
of bold and risky gambit by Russev's lawyer. He essentially
told the court that Marslek had received a request from
CIA to help airlift some US personnel from Carbul during
(24:15):
the military withdrawal in the in August of twenty twenty one.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
So that is quite the claim Marcelek contracting for the CIA,
working on demand for the arch nemesis of his Russian paymasters.
Russev's defense made the case that getting Americans out of
Carbull 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
(24:46):
of saving people's lives. You might recall the situation. After
nearly twenty years, the US military was withdrawing from Afghanistan,
but the final months of that process were chaotic. The
Taliban unexpectedly surged towards Karbl, the capital. Thousands of Westerners
and many Afghanis who had worked with them were desperate
(25:07):
to flee, and there simply weren't enough flights out of
the country. The prosecution told the judge that Rusev'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 Roucev had
some kind of humanitarian conscience at his center.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
I mean, obviously the prosecution came back absolutely full throttle.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
Against this as they really tried to slap it down.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
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
(25:58):
the GRU or the FSB was sort of a misleading idea.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
The thing is, though, this wild claim about the airlift
made by the defense barrister in court, it's all there
in black and white in the telegram messages between Rusev
and Marsilek from the time.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
Interesting request from ours sort of friends at the CIA.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
This is Marcelek writing to Russev on August seventeenth, twenty
twenty one, three days after the evacuation of Carbel began.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
They urgently need aircraft to fly out contractors from Afghanistan. Apparently,
all dodgy airlift companies in Russia and Turkey, et cetera
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?
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Now, 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. Rusev tells Marcelek the situation on
the ground in Afghani Pistan is a nightmare. Marcelegg replies,
(27:13):
America needs you, Pax.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Americana rests on your broad and manly shoulders.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Just discussing with the Americans. Apparently since eleven am today
the airport is okay and fifteen military.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
Aircraft took off today.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
But it can change any moment.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
I can't tell you what did or didn't happen in
car Bull regarding these flights. In the end, but I
have three hypotheses. One, Marcelek 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
(28:12):
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 twenty eighteen. Paul,
do you remember the uncles? I do. I'm chatting with
(28:39):
Paul Murphy again, my former editor, about a lead we
had been given about Martlek. At the time, we set
it aside because it was just a single fleck of evidence,
and frankly, we had our hands full.
Speaker 4 (28:53):
We were at that point of intense coverage of the
wire card fraud story, and suddenly, out of the blue,
I got an email from somebody anonymously saying that they
had been looked into an email conversation accidentally, and I
(29:13):
might be interested in the content.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
Being looked in, as in, someone had typed the wrong
email address and they they had sent it to.
Speaker 4 (29:20):
Them precisely precisely.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
There 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 them to Paul.
Speaker 4 (29:41):
And quite extraordinary. It was a series of emails between
a group of I assume men who referred 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.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
Paul and I dug up the emails. Here's the first
message Jan Marcelex sends to the uncles. 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. Marcelett goes on to
(30:24):
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.
Speaker 4 (30:33):
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
(30:55):
shaping the domestic dialogue on the subject in Austria would
be appreciated. 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?
(31:16):
There are kind of whatever the five or six email
addresses all proton mail addresses. We were able to identify
a number of these.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Because there's 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 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
(31:52):
about who these kind of people are, what kind of
world they move in.
Speaker 4 (31:56):
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 US ambassador.
We're talking here about people who were basically x US military,
(32:19):
x 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.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
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 Carbul 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 marce Lek had somehow found his way into,
(32:58):
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. It's which
encapsulates for me the kind of like this, this kind
(33:19):
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
Yan Marcelek.
Speaker 4 (33:40):
There's a real sense here that Jan was actually knitted
into this group.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
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 Marcelek is involved with.
And this isn't just a Russia thing anymore. When I
(34:18):
think of many of the people I've learned about as
I've reported on this series, people who've been cultivated by
Marcelek 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.
(34:39):
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
(35:02):
anti establishmentism, a political belief that things need to be undermined, broken,
for Yan Marcelect, 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,
(35:28):
and he sought out worlds that seemed to expose that
a payment processing company making its money from gambling and
pawn 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
(35:50):
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 Yan Marcelect, I felt he
was the key to understanding something about Russia, the country
that first lured him, in country whose government had turned
(36:10):
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
(36:33):
of crime and clandestine political networks. It's a political force,
it's a way of doing business. Funnily enough, I think
it was Killian Kleinschmidt, who we met in Tunisia, who
first latched onto this notion fitting I suppose, given that
(36:55):
he was the first to give me an insight into
the destructive life of Jan Marselekt.
Speaker 6 (37:00):
That's his kick, that's his Adrinavin. It's like playing a video.
Speaker 4 (37:06):
Game or something.
Speaker 6 (37:08):
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 three years.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
So it's kind of it's Yan's world out there.
Speaker 6 (37:21):
The Yan's world becomes the normal.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
Marcelek 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. Hot Money is a production of The
(37:49):
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 Marine Saint. Our show is edited by Karen Shakerji,
fact check by Kira Levigne, sound design and mastering by
(38:13):
Jake Gorsky and Marcelo de Olivia, 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 Gains McQuaid and
Matthew Garahan. Additional editing by Paul Murphy. Special thanks to
(38:36):
Ruler Calaffe, Dan McCrumb, Laura Clark, Alistair Mackey, Manuela Saragosa,
Nigel Hanson, Vicki Merrick, with special thanks to the Studio
Audio Berlin and to James Morris who read Jan Marceleg's messages,
and Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Jake Flanagan, Jacob Goldstein, Sarah
(38:57):
Nix and Greta Cohne. I'm Sam Jones. I want to
take a moment to thank you for being a pushkin
Plus subscriber. I hope you are enjoying hot money. Be
sure to take advantage of all pushkin Plus has to offer,
(39:20):
including add free access to all pushkin shows, bonus episodes,
early access, exclusive binges, and full audiobooks. After this episode
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