March 21, 2025 • 39 mins
Christo Grozev is a Bulgarian investigative journalist who has spent years tracking down Russian spies and is on Vladimir Putin’s wanted list.
Grozev’s open-source journalism exposed spies linked to the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in 2018 and Alexei Navalny in 2020.
Now he is at the centre of his own sinister Kremlin plot, as a Bulgarian spy-ring was sent by Moscow to target him and planned to kidnap and kill him, before they were arrested and convicted in the UK.
He speaks to Krishnan Guru-Murthy in this episode of Ways to Change the World ahead of the streaming release of his new documentary ‘Kill List: Hunted by Putin’s Spies’ - which is available on Channel 4.
Produced by Silvia Maresca, Calum Fraser, Ka Yee Mak.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Hello, and welcome to Ways to Change the World.
I'm Christian Gary Murphy, and this is the podcast in which we
talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas in their
lives and the events that have helped shape them.
My guest this week is Christo Grosje.
He's an open source journalist, and he made his name on the
Bellingcat website and organization exposing Russian
intelligence, exposing Russian spies, and he's been
(00:24):
instrumental in a number of court cases around the world and
has put people behind bars. He's paid an intensely high
price for it as well. It's dramatically changed the
way he has to live. He is essentially separated from
his family and he was the targetof that Bulgarian spy ring that
was exposed in London very recently.
(00:46):
He was on the kill list. Welcome.
Thank you. Krista Grazev, how would you
change the world? I can imagine a better world.
I don't think I can change it. I wish the world was learning
from the best and not going to the lowest common denominator,
which is what we're seeing in the last 20 years.
And I wish the world had a country that is the beacon of a
(01:10):
higher moral ground, which used to be the case when I was
growing up. There was the United States.
There was that beacon, a very fictional one, but yet a beacon
that could be a country that others could sort of align
themselves to. And that's gone.
So I'm afraid that that is the biggest problem in the world.
From my point of view. There's no one country or one
(01:32):
group of countries that can say we are the ones that stick to
the moral truth and to morality.There's that's gone.
So I wish that could be brought back.
You're you're a very unusual kind of journalist.
You're not what most people conjure.
Your investigations have had huge impact and have caused
(01:54):
great problems, particularly forVladimir Putin.
And for myself. And for yourself and you've had
great personal expense as a result of that which which I
want to unpack. But but what?
What has driven you as a journalist to investigate?
You know the secret services, the murderers, you know the
(02:17):
state sanctioned murderers, despite all the obvious dangers?
I think it's just the awareness that one is able to that a
simple person, a civilian can dothe job that we always expected
the intelligence services to do.For this discovery.
I, I think greatly my ex colleagues from Bellingcat and,
(02:38):
and Elliot Higgins, because if he hadn't opened the door for me
to join the team of volunteers early on, I would not have had
the sort of the, I would not have spent the time discovering
this new capability that a civilian can discover things
that governments are trying to hide.
And once you know you can do that, it's very hard to not do
(02:58):
it because A, there's a kind of a moral responsibility, a moral
imperative for you to continue doing that.
And, and B, there's a bit of a adrenaline rush when you are
being attacked by the big guys, when they're the ones that get
worried about your work. That means that it's worth it.
(03:19):
Can, can you explain what it is that you have done?
Because people, I think people don't really understand what
open source journalism means. And even Elliot Higgins, a
Bellingcat talks about you as sort of as a man with special
skills. It's it's, it's not that they
taught you what you know, but you, you do things that even
they find difficult to get theirheads around.
No, it's it's pretty simple. You just sit down and think
(03:42):
about the problem like a detective would.
And then you apply all the digital tools that the old
detectives of the Sherlock Holmes type wouldn't have had.
So it's a combination of methodological constructing an
investigation, thinking where would traces be have been left
by these government killers and to that.
And it helps that you learn whattheir traditional mistakes are.
(04:05):
And over time, you learn more and more about their trade craft
and their mistakes and then justconstruct, construct an
investigation. And then you use all the digital
tools available, which include reverse face search, which
wasn't available 10 years ago, but now it is you delve into
thousands of leaked databases. You just have to have the
(04:25):
patience to aggregate them, keepthem on your laptop, not lose
your laptop. Have the patience and the time
to browse at Excel tables for databases for days knowing that
the success rate of you discovering the pattern or
discovering the the truth or small.
I just work until it pays off. What kind of mistakes do they
(04:48):
make that make it easier? For you, you want to hear the
the fun part? Absolutely.
Well, it started with us discovering when we were
investigating this crippled poisonous in Salisbury, we
discovered that the two Russian spies and that's how we actually
proved there were spies initially had used passports
with a consecutive number. And then we discovered that all
(05:11):
of the Russian spies travelling on the fake identity abroad had
traditionally been using passports with consecutive
numbers, which allowed us to actually find even spies that we
didn't know were spies and pinpoint them to locations and
times when things had happened, like an explosion of a munition
facility in the Czech Republic in 2014 that previously had not
been tied to Russian spies. Now we knew that that must be
(05:34):
tied because six of these fake Russian identities popped up
exactly before the explosions there.
Similarly, poisoning of a Bulgarian arms dealer in 2015,
Leon Gebrev. Again, seven of these spies with
fake identities pop up just before that, so this will be one
example of mistakes they made. And how do you how do you know
that those passports have shown up somewhere?
(05:55):
Is this is this leaked databases?
Yes, over the last 10 years they've been ever growing sort
of amalgamation of of leaked travel databases mostly from
Russia. And the reason why Russia is
such a large source of leaked databases, because their
government is likes to control people, to surveil people.
So they aggregate every piece ofdata about their citizens, every
(06:16):
ticket purchased, whether that'san airplane or, or or a train or
a bus, it gets brought into the central database that the
Russian Security Service like topeek into and and and, and check
on their people. But over time, this same system
gets very corrupt and police officers would accelerate the
base, start selling these data sets on the black market that
(06:39):
ultimately it is leaked after a couple of years to open source
locations because it's no longeras valuable.
So we've just been aggregating these large data sets.
The downside of that is obviously you can discover
better, more easily older crimes.
But still, we brought many, manycold cases back to being
investigated because many governments or many law
(07:02):
enforcement agencies had stoppedinvestigating.
And two years or three years later, we find the evidence in
such league databases and we literally guilt them into
reopening the cases. I mean, it's very interesting
that when I say what drives you,it's sort of it's because you
can, because you can find those things out, because I think a
lot of people would assume that what drives you is you want to
(07:22):
bring down Vladimir Putin or youwant to bring down the Russian
secret services. Well, that becomes that becomes
a drive, but it's secondary. And if I had discovered a way to
prove other governments crimes as easily and if those crimes
existed, I would not have been, I would not have stopped just
(07:43):
because it's the US versus Vladimir Putin.
But it is true that as I starteddiscovering more and more of
these crimes, the monstrosity and the size of this system of
government crimes has become ideological for me, an
additional ideological driver. Because I could not imagine,
could not have imagined until wediscovered the Navalny poisoning
(08:03):
in 2020, that there had been a government program for
assassination of their own citizens.
Before that we thought, well, they occasionally like the
Mossad would do, targeting killings abroad of enemies of
the state. But then suddenly we discovered
they've had an industrial scale program for assassinating their
own people. And that cannot but leave a
(08:24):
trace in your in your sort of a moral compass.
How were you informed that this Bulgarian spy ring were after
you and probably wanted to kill you?
Well, that was the day that my life changed.
I was not informed directly because I don't think the law
(08:46):
enforcement agent who told me that knew where the danger was
coming from at that particular day and time.
I was doing a screening of the film Navalny in New York during
a short trip in early 2023, justbefore the Oscars.
And I got a call from law enforcement in the US who told
me you cannot leave back for Europe.
(09:08):
I was planning to leave that same day, that same evening.
And I said, come on, you must bekidding.
I have a ticket for tonight. Well, they said, we don't
recommend that you leave becausethere's a team waiting for you
there. I said, what kind of team would
that be? Just some cyber espionage,
somebody trying to peek into my laptop.
And they said, no, it's, it's much worse than that, but we
(09:29):
can't tell you more. So just stay here.
So I stayed there and it took a couple of weeks more before I
was told by Austrian security services that where I used to
live at the time, that it is a team of Bulgarians that have
been hired by Jan Marsalik to work in favour of Russian
security services. And again, the seriousness with
(09:51):
which Austrian security servicestold me about that implied that
there's a much more professionaloperation that had been going on
for years, but they would not tell me because I was a
potential witness in the Britishlegal proceedings.
So I I got very, very little in terms of details and I was asked
not to investigate it myself in order to not interfere with the
(10:14):
judicial process here. What did you say to your wife?
Well, at the time basically I got the the message I told you
so. And I think she was right about
that because she had told me so was.
She angry? Yeah, because the impact on your
life has been extraordinary. Just give me a sense of what it
(10:38):
has done to you. Well, it's suffice it to say
that I live a a separate life and I'm not living with my
family anymore. And that's probably for the
better from a security perspective for for my kids as
well. Do you think it was worth it?
My children think so. And I think that's a very
(10:59):
important moral compass for anyone.
If they can understand why I hadto make the sacrifice and they
had to make the sacrifice, then I think it is worth it.
But again, it's not a formula that can be applied to every
life. And it depends on where in life
you are and then what, how much you've contributed to your
(11:21):
family in the past and to your children.
And I was probably lucky that itdidn't happen earlier when my
children would have beated me much more than they do now.
It looks like your daughter's sort of followed in your
footsteps a little. My daughter actually discovered
one of the six arrested spies and I can't be prouder.
Also importantly, because she also has a right to say, I told
(11:45):
you so, she had pointed out thisman, the 6th of the arrested
spies in 2022 in the street. And she said, dad, I think
that's a spy following us. And I said, Sophia, don't try to
be like your dad. I mean, let me handle the spy
catching you. Just do your school thing.
She said, no, dad, I'm sure thathe's a spy.
(12:06):
And she snapped a photo of him. And two years later, turned out
that that photo was very, very important for proving that on
the day that this spy ring brokeinto my apartment in Vienna to
steal my laptop, the one that they thought was the laptop from
the Navalny film, that this person had been staking this out
(12:27):
outside to make sure we don't goto the apartment.
But only my daughter, who's 14 outside, had noticed that
person. Yes.
I mean, if they all had all toldyou so, you, you must have also
known really that this was a risk that you were running.
Because the people who you're friends with, the people who you
have known, whether it's Navalnyor Vladimir Karamuza, these
(12:50):
people have all been targeted too.
You're right. I mean, it was maybe a
subconscious decision to ignore,ignore the signs because if we
start living by by the signs andby fear, then we'll be
completely our hands will be tied.
So I probably fooled myself intobelieving that I'm not as
(13:11):
important for them, that they would imagine that because all
of my investigations are, are a product of group work.
I mean, I've trained many, many colleagues in the same dark arts
of data journalism, essentially.And working with databases, I
mean, doing something to me would not stop this process.
(13:33):
It's become very trendy among especially Russian journalists.
They love doing this, and they're thousands of them who
have left the country, have the freedom to work independently
from censorship. So I thought, yeah, nobody would
try to get rid of me because it would not solve the problem.
But apparently, as we find out now from the chats that have
been disclosed, I've offended Putin personally and he was a
(14:00):
driver behind this whole operation and he hates me, as
Mars, Alex said in one of the messages.
Why have you offended prison personally?
What? What is it that he's annoyed
about? I think it boils down and and
looking at exactly when this operation started, it started
the evening of the day of our publication of the Navalny
(14:21):
poisoning. It started on the 14th of
December 2020 to 20/20/20. And that was the day we
published the Navalny investigation where we
essentially pointed out this industrial scale program of of
trying to assassinate political opponents.
But we also made fun of the FSB,Putin's favorite intelligence
(14:43):
agency, because we showed their faces, we showed how easy it is
to trace them. We showed all the mistakes they
made and we had one of them confess on the phone in a 53
minute long interview to his ownvictim Navalny that they had
tried to kill him. And that really, really
(15:04):
embarrassed Putin furthermore, because he went on, on the TV
press conference to say that allof this is fake news and all of
this information is not the product of journalistic
investigation, but something that has been fed to us by
intelligence agencies, by MI 6 or CIA.
(15:26):
So that explains why for the longest time, this group of six
and many more that are part of this operation were looking for
the fictional fantastical evidence that we have some
connection to an intelligence service.
And then when they didn't find it, they were so angry that they
decided to switch to kidnapping or killing.
(15:46):
I mean, that's really interesting then.
So do you think Putin and all his acolytes genuinely believe
what they say, that you are an instrument of the CIA or?
That's a very good question. So I asked this question to the
person who recruited Yanmar Salek, the main person in charge
of this operation. In a very strange and somewhat
(16:08):
sincere phone call with this Russian recruiter spymaster, I
asked exactly this question. Do they believe this nonsense?
And he said, Cristo, I have to understand some people can sleep
much better at night if they believe their enemy is the CA,
then if they have to acknowledgethat they've been fooled by a
(16:30):
journalist. And I think that makes a lot of
sense. You embarrassed them.
Yes, yes. And it's they take that
embarrassment, they would take it with much a much softer
landing if they thought that they'd been outsmarted by this
huge enemy and not by some civilian group of journalists.
How many Russian agents have youexposed?
(16:51):
Thousands, but here's how it works.
We name. We've named probably 60.
We'd never named them unnecessarily.
We only publish their names whenthey're in the context of an
actual crime. But we have thousands in our
Excel sheets and spreadsheets. And the problem with that for
(17:16):
the Russian intelligence services, they don't know how
many we know. So they've recalled everybody
who has made ever any of these mistakes that we've identified.
So they've been taken out of. Circulation they've been taken
out well they've been brought inbrought back to Russia they
don't travel anymore but they'reused to train new new spies they
used to train these people in inthe UK who are a new type of
(17:37):
spies like hybrid spies they're they're criminals essentially
who moonlight the spies I. Mean this group in the UK we're
almost sort of comically bad. That was like a cheap version of
Ocean's 11 kind of bad. Yeah, but.
But again, that doesn't take away from the from from the risk
(17:58):
of what they could have done. And being bad at what you do
doesn't make you less dangerous.In fact, in many cases
professional spies are less dangerous, especially to in
terms of collateral damage to bystanders then such people.
These people don't know how to de escalate.
On that day when this group broke into my apartment in
(18:19):
Vienna to steal the laptop, theyhad not done their homework to
find out that my son was in his room playing a computer game and
he stayed doing that throughout their burglary.
Imagine what would have happenedif he had walked out of his
room. I don't want to think about it,
but that's something a professional spy would not have
done. So again, the the fact that they
(18:40):
were called Minias, but I call them Muppets, doesn't make them
less dangerous than professionalspies.
They tried to burn down the house that they believed
belonged to me in Bulgaria. There was just a Random House
that they had misidentified. So that is not not dangerous.
It also exposed the way they hadgone after your family and
(19:03):
perhaps your father in particular.
Can you tell me what happened and what you what you think was
behind it? I still believe and hope this is
a cosmic coincidence. But shortly after, I was warned
that I should not come back to Europe, and I made it public in
(19:24):
a interview in Austrian newspapers.
And my father actually then posted a link to that interview
on Facebook. And literally the next day, my
father stopped answering phone calls from me.
And yeah, four days later, we discovered that he was dead in
his home near Vienna. And that was treated as a
(19:47):
suspicious incident by the Austrian police.
They took his body and and did all kinds of tests for months
and we couldn't really have a funeral.
But I had kind of parked that into sort of the cold cases and
probably a coincidence section of my memory until the police
(20:11):
here showed me photographs of this team camped out in front of
my father's apartment and then doing a selfie in front of the
terrace to the apartment with anarrow saying this way in.
And this has opened up this wound again for me because I, I
cannot now not look at this as apotential, a potential, a very
(20:31):
small chance, but small probability, but still a
potential operation by others, not by this team, but held by
this team to bring me back to Austria at the time when they
knew that I would not come back in order for them to continue
with the operation. Do you believe he was murdered?
(20:51):
I don't know and I'm not sure I want to know.
That is the sort of the ultimateillustration, isn't it, of the,
the toll on you from choosing this life.
What, what do you think it tellsus about what you're up against
(21:14):
and that regime? I would like to broaden the
answer because it tells us aboutthe new reality in the world.
Because I'm afraid that what seemed to me for years to be the
shocking truth about this regimethat it only takes to explain to
the world that that's happening,that the world will be shocked
(21:37):
and will take measures to bring this regime down or to help the,
the people who are the victims. We see that becoming normalised
and and befriended by the US administration.
So I'm, I probably, that is the biggest bummer for me.
I mean, it's not that I have been able to single handedly
(21:59):
bring down Putin, which is obviously a lost cause, but it's
the fact that what used to be the biggest helper for
independent journalism, the United States with all its
resources, sanctions and, and intelligence services and the
ability to do cyber counter attacks and stuff that is
(22:22):
essentially being put to the service of Russia now.
So if anything, the value of what I do and what my colleagues
do, what Roman Dombrojotov does,increases significantly because
is going to come during a shortfall in what used to be
done by governments before. So what?
What do you think that kind of exposure is achieving or could
(22:44):
achieve? Well, it does mobilize the good
people around the world. I mean, people default to, by
definition, the best of people default to the least amount of
information they can live with so that they don't have to
worry. And it takes bringing and
(23:06):
showing them and pointing them and convincing them of the
injustice around them for them to start worrying.
And I think this is what this does it.
It just brings to the fore in the West the granular details of
how cruel this regime is and also shows the danger to the
Western world of this home of, of, of this very regime
(23:30):
overstepping physically the boundaries of of their
operations to come, come over and do The Dirty work here.
When you say this kind of journalism is increasingly
popular, particularly in Russia,do you think those people are
taking the same kinds of risks as you?
I think they're taking you a bigger risks because they cannot
(23:52):
even imagine going back to theirown homes anymore.
They have to live a life of exiles and they didn't
necessarily choose that. I mean, for me, it was a choice.
It was a conscious choice. They were they were pushed into
that just because they couldn't do proper journalism.
The only thing that they wanted to do and stay in Russia, they,
(24:13):
the moment they published anything resembling journalism,
they would have been jailed and and ended up maybe even killed.
So they had to leave the countryand many of them went to the
United States. I might want to belabour the
point, but many of them went to the United States and now
they're faced with another dilemma like are they saved
there? In fact, their visas are
(24:34):
expiring and they they may not be renewed.
So I think the Russian colleagues are taking even
bigger risks. What What was your first big
exposure? But where was the moment you
realized what you were doing or what you're on to?
I would say that, well, the first big expose was on the
disinformation campaign around the Downing of a Malaysian
Airlines MH 17, which I published on Bellingcat in 2015.
(24:58):
The first real investigation that showed that you can do
these things that only intelligence agencies we thought
were able to or even better thanthey was.
When I helped identify the voices or the names behind the
voices of several Russian officers behind the Downing of
MH 17 that were published by theDutch investigators with a call
(25:21):
for action saying we can't identify these people.
Can you, the world help us? And we jumped on that with
again, such an adrenaline rush when the government says they
can't do something. I would say that was the first
one that proved to me and to my colleagues we can be better than
than government intelligence services.
Similarly, when the British police that Mets published the
(25:43):
faces of two random Russians saying who are these people?
Because we think these names arefake, we felt again the same
adrenaline Russia. And I did, and it I discarded
everything else I was doing for two months until I found who
they were and we published the names.
And it it it it derived enormoushappiness from being better than
(26:05):
governments. So again, how did you identify
them? Just talk.
Take us through the sequence. Well, I wish we had the time for
that, but first identification was to prove that these people
don't exist. And this is relatively easy with
the volume of data leaking out of Russia.
You have databases of residential records, of
passports that go back 20 years.And when you look at the name,
(26:29):
look for a name in that databaseand find that it only suddenly
appears in 2015, but it didn't exist before, it's easy to know
that this is a fake identity. I mean, you don't get born at
age 37, right? So we knew immediately that
these names don't exist because they don't exist in all
databases. But then finally, who they
really were took a good three months of work.
(26:51):
And in one case we were lucky because we were able to find a
face matching the face of one ofthese poisoners on the wall of
wall of fame of a military institute in eastern part of
Russia, where he had been calledour hero, Our military hero,
(27:13):
having achieved so many exploitsaround the world.
And that was the same face of ofthe person.
When you say you've managed to find the face, are you using
some very sophisticated softwareto?
Redraw use face face search software.
But in that particular case, it just took countless hours of
going through literal Facebooks of like school yearbooks of the
(27:39):
most likely universities in Russia that would have trained
spies. We started with that.
We asked which would be the military institutes that would
train undercover spies, elite spies, and we had only two that
would have likely generated thisoutput of spies in the late 90s.
So we went through hours and hours of footage, graduation
(28:01):
photos and, and in this particular case, it was an
alumnus from that in institute who had gone through the whole
campus with his camera and posted it on YouTube and was
showing everything that was on the walls.
And in one instance, he's walking by a wall of fame.
And we just noticed this guy looks like that guy who's made a
(28:23):
forensic comparison of the two faces and it was a match of 97%.
Well, so when you look at what is now called mainstream
journalism, popular journalism, do you do you find yourself
thinking you could do so much more?
They have started doing so much more.
I think the dawn of realization that open source is a totally
(28:47):
mis misused or underused the source of information.
That was about seven or eight years ago.
And both journalists started implementing those tricks and
tools into their newsroom, but also intelligence services that
previously didn't they, they thought that was kind of a the,
the poor relation of, of investigations because it's free
(29:11):
and they liked using their clothes sources.
There's, there's their informants.
But both journalists started doing that and and intelligence
agents started doing that. I do sometimes still find a bulk
at the at, at at seeing how men,some mainstream media still
report what a source told them where I see so many easy ways
(29:34):
for them to validate that through data, but they just stop
at that. We were told, and this is what
we report. And I think that's that's falls
short of the demands of journalism.
So I mean, you are now a target and you've been warned and you
(29:54):
know for a fact that people havebeen out to get you.
I mean, do you get any help? Do you have protection?
Do you, you know, are you, are you, are you on your own or or
do you have support? I I do have general support.
I have moral support when I'm inthe United States.
I, I get advised of the risk sort of factor as it changes.
(30:19):
I cannot safely go back to Austria unless I'm accompanied
by a whole team of bodyguards atany given time and and I'm
advised not to go to the rest ofEurope.
So that's kind of the limitationthat I have to the.
Whole of Europe. The whole of Continental.
(30:39):
Europe you can't go to. I'm advised not to.
It's too easy for Russian spies or their Muppets to travel
around the continent without leaving a trace.
And so is Britain relatively safe because of border controls?
Exactly. Yeah, because of the new and
more intelligent border controls.
Because border controls exist in2018.
(31:02):
But somebody let these fake identities get visas to the UK.
Somebody let these sequential passports with 0 history behind
them enter the country and poison the scribble family and
kill an innocent bystander. That was the wrong, unsafe
(31:23):
Britain. And I'm told that has changed.
Do you feel by raising your headas you are now in a documentary,
in interviews you know your highprofile?
Are you increasing your risk or are you protecting yourself?
I think that the risk is has peaked and I don't think I can
(31:44):
offend put in twice and they don't forget.
These people don't forget. So I think the question is
wrong. The question is, what is the
best usage of my time now that Iknow that the risk is at its
peak and it's to speak out? So you will carry on.
I'm carrying on. And and and will you turn your
(32:07):
attention to other regimes as well?
Or when you say this has become ideological for you, do you feel
a moral duty to focus on this one?
Well, my belief is that again, when I was a kid, I remember
seeing this Bulgarian film in which a kid asked their mother,
(32:28):
Mum, why do you tell me that I should not befriend bad kids,
bad students at school Because I'll become like them.
Why don't they become like me? And I think that's the general
problem in in the world that I think the example that is said
by Putin of, of the impunity andbeing able to get away with
(32:50):
anything and enrich yourself in the process is a perfect
template, a model for so many other governments around the
world, including the United States at this point in time.
And I think that if by any miracle we're able to defeat
that regime, that example will prove to be non sustainable,
(33:11):
unsustainable. And I think that in itself will
help the whole world, not just Russia or, or the Russians
rather. And that's why I think I should
continue doing what I can do best, which is identify Russian
spies, getting them jailed, and maybe in the end trade them for
good Russians that are in jail in Russia.
(33:34):
There is a very striking exampleof precisely that isn't there in
your life. Could you tell me about that
example and how it felt to have a, you know, a man you know is a
murderer released? It's one of the hardest moral
choices I've ever had to make inmy life.
I in 2019, I helped identify thethe murderer in in a political
(34:01):
assassination that took place inBerlin.
And the murderer was an FSB officer who killed a Chechen
Georgian asylum seeker who was trying to get asylum in Germany
at the time. In broad daylight, we identified
the murderer. It took all of the tricks of our
(34:21):
trade to prove that he was not who he said he was and to prove
his affiliation with the Russianintelligence services.
And I was brought in as an expert witness by the German
prosecutors, and it was largely based on my testimony that the
court accepted that he was a state murderer and jailed him
for life. Just remind me of his name.
(34:42):
His name was Vladimir Krasikov. I stayed three days in court and
three days I was stared down by this killer from his cubicle.
And that was a cold stare that Istill remember to today.
And years later when I had realized in the meantime, his
personally, his importance personally to President Putin
(35:02):
because we found that he was hispersonal assassin and bodyguard
and so on and so forth. And Putin himself made very,
very strong state statements publicly that he wants him back
and he wants him free. We knew that that's the biggest
value that the West holds in terms of a trading card in order
for a release of all of the Russian prisoners or or Western
(35:24):
prisoners in Russian jails. And it started with Navalny,
because Navalny at that time wascritically ill in jail.
And we needed to find something to offer to put into trade and
for together with other political prisoners.
And there were several Americansalso and Westerners in Russian
jails. So I started working on this
back channel multilateral negotiation to try to get
(35:48):
Navalny out, to try to get Vladimir Karamuza out, who was
also jailed at the time, to try to get Ivan Gerskovich, the Wall
Street Journal reporter was jailed.
And I knew that the one thing that could help all of these
people get out was the man put in wanted back.
And even though there was a hardmoral choice because he was a
killer and the family of the killed person in, in in Germany,
(36:12):
they didn't want him to walk free.
And I, I totally understand why,but I still thought that it's
better to have the people who are still alive and could pose a
problem political problem for Putin and could give hope to the
other Russians that there can bea change for them to be free and
alive than for the abstract justice of keeping this guy in
(36:36):
jail for, for life to, to endure.
So I, I recommend it for this swap.
And ultimately it happened, but it was a very hard choice.
What is your feeling now about the strength of Putin in Russia
and whether there is grounds forhope from your point of view?
(36:58):
I think Putin suddenly feels reinvigorated and validated
because of the United States position again.
I mean, for the first time, voting alongside with Russia in
in history that I remember is something that he internalizes
as his own victory. But I think empires tend to fail
(37:22):
and fall whenever there's a sense of complacency.
And I think Putin is getting to the point of being complacent.
So I'm really hopeful. You never know how an empire is
going to fall. They always fall in a most
unpredictable way. But I do think that this sense
of complacency and, and as we see even in the case of the six
(37:43):
pies here, a system built aroundhim that misinforms him, that
wants to tell him what he wants to, to hear.
We see throughout this three-year, 2 1/2 year operation
that they've been lining up the food chain, lining up the
pyramid by providing fake explanations and and success
stories have never happened. I think it is this that will be
(38:06):
the undoing of Putin. He lives in a bubble.
He thinks there's no risk for him at this point and the risk
will pop up unexpectedly to him.So how easy is it for you to be
an optimist? I'm an optimist and I think in
the long run I've been proven tobe right.
(38:29):
So it's it's not hard. It's not hard.
I mean, being an optimist is theonly thing that can explain why
I'm doing what I'm doing. So it's easy.
Krista Grosje, thank you very much indeed.
Thank you. Thank you for sharing your story
and I hope you found that as fascinating as I did.
If you did, then give us a rating or a review and then
other people will find the ways to change the world.
(38:49):
Podcast. Our producer is Sylvia Maresca.
Until next time, bye bye.
Hello, and welcome to Ways to Change the World.
I'm Christian Gary Murphy, and this is the podcast in which we
talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas in their
lives and the events that have helped shape them.
My guest this week is Christo Grosje.
He's an open source journalist, and he made his name on the
Bellingcat website and organization exposing Russian
intelligence, exposing Russian spies, and he's been
(00:24):
instrumental in a number of court cases around the world and
has put people behind bars. He's paid an intensely high
price for it as well. It's dramatically changed the
way he has to live. He is essentially separated from
his family and he was the targetof that Bulgarian spy ring that
was exposed in London very recently.
(00:46):
He was on the kill list. Welcome.
Thank you. Krista Grazev, how would you
change the world? I can imagine a better world.
I don't think I can change it. I wish the world was learning
from the best and not going to the lowest common denominator,
which is what we're seeing in the last 20 years.
And I wish the world had a country that is the beacon of a
(01:10):
higher moral ground, which used to be the case when I was
growing up. There was the United States.
There was that beacon, a very fictional one, but yet a beacon
that could be a country that others could sort of align
themselves to. And that's gone.
So I'm afraid that that is the biggest problem in the world.
From my point of view. There's no one country or one
(01:32):
group of countries that can say we are the ones that stick to
the moral truth and to morality.There's that's gone.
So I wish that could be brought back.
You're you're a very unusual kind of journalist.
You're not what most people conjure.
Your investigations have had huge impact and have caused
(01:54):
great problems, particularly forVladimir Putin.
And for myself. And for yourself and you've had
great personal expense as a result of that which which I
want to unpack. But but what?
What has driven you as a journalist to investigate?
You know the secret services, the murderers, you know the
(02:17):
state sanctioned murderers, despite all the obvious dangers?
I think it's just the awareness that one is able to that a
simple person, a civilian can dothe job that we always expected
the intelligence services to do.For this discovery.
I, I think greatly my ex colleagues from Bellingcat and,
(02:38):
and Elliot Higgins, because if he hadn't opened the door for me
to join the team of volunteers early on, I would not have had
the sort of the, I would not have spent the time discovering
this new capability that a civilian can discover things
that governments are trying to hide.
And once you know you can do that, it's very hard to not do
(02:58):
it because A, there's a kind of a moral responsibility, a moral
imperative for you to continue doing that.
And, and B, there's a bit of a adrenaline rush when you are
being attacked by the big guys, when they're the ones that get
worried about your work. That means that it's worth it.
(03:19):
Can, can you explain what it is that you have done?
Because people, I think people don't really understand what
open source journalism means. And even Elliot Higgins, a
Bellingcat talks about you as sort of as a man with special
skills. It's it's, it's not that they
taught you what you know, but you, you do things that even
they find difficult to get theirheads around.
No, it's it's pretty simple. You just sit down and think
(03:42):
about the problem like a detective would.
And then you apply all the digital tools that the old
detectives of the Sherlock Holmes type wouldn't have had.
So it's a combination of methodological constructing an
investigation, thinking where would traces be have been left
by these government killers and to that.
And it helps that you learn whattheir traditional mistakes are.
(04:05):
And over time, you learn more and more about their trade craft
and their mistakes and then justconstruct, construct an
investigation. And then you use all the digital
tools available, which include reverse face search, which
wasn't available 10 years ago, but now it is you delve into
thousands of leaked databases. You just have to have the
(04:25):
patience to aggregate them, keepthem on your laptop, not lose
your laptop. Have the patience and the time
to browse at Excel tables for databases for days knowing that
the success rate of you discovering the pattern or
discovering the the truth or small.
I just work until it pays off. What kind of mistakes do they
(04:48):
make that make it easier? For you, you want to hear the
the fun part? Absolutely.
Well, it started with us discovering when we were
investigating this crippled poisonous in Salisbury, we
discovered that the two Russian spies and that's how we actually
proved there were spies initially had used passports
with a consecutive number. And then we discovered that all
(05:11):
of the Russian spies travelling on the fake identity abroad had
traditionally been using passports with consecutive
numbers, which allowed us to actually find even spies that we
didn't know were spies and pinpoint them to locations and
times when things had happened, like an explosion of a munition
facility in the Czech Republic in 2014 that previously had not
been tied to Russian spies. Now we knew that that must be
(05:34):
tied because six of these fake Russian identities popped up
exactly before the explosions there.
Similarly, poisoning of a Bulgarian arms dealer in 2015,
Leon Gebrev. Again, seven of these spies with
fake identities pop up just before that, so this will be one
example of mistakes they made. And how do you how do you know
that those passports have shown up somewhere?
(05:55):
Is this is this leaked databases?
Yes, over the last 10 years they've been ever growing sort
of amalgamation of of leaked travel databases mostly from
Russia. And the reason why Russia is
such a large source of leaked databases, because their
government is likes to control people, to surveil people.
So they aggregate every piece ofdata about their citizens, every
(06:16):
ticket purchased, whether that'san airplane or, or or a train or
a bus, it gets brought into the central database that the
Russian Security Service like topeek into and and and, and check
on their people. But over time, this same system
gets very corrupt and police officers would accelerate the
base, start selling these data sets on the black market that
(06:39):
ultimately it is leaked after a couple of years to open source
locations because it's no longeras valuable.
So we've just been aggregating these large data sets.
The downside of that is obviously you can discover
better, more easily older crimes.
But still, we brought many, manycold cases back to being
investigated because many governments or many law
(07:02):
enforcement agencies had stoppedinvestigating.
And two years or three years later, we find the evidence in
such league databases and we literally guilt them into
reopening the cases. I mean, it's very interesting
that when I say what drives you,it's sort of it's because you
can, because you can find those things out, because I think a
lot of people would assume that what drives you is you want to
(07:22):
bring down Vladimir Putin or youwant to bring down the Russian
secret services. Well, that becomes that becomes
a drive, but it's secondary. And if I had discovered a way to
prove other governments crimes as easily and if those crimes
existed, I would not have been, I would not have stopped just
(07:43):
because it's the US versus Vladimir Putin.
But it is true that as I starteddiscovering more and more of
these crimes, the monstrosity and the size of this system of
government crimes has become ideological for me, an
additional ideological driver. Because I could not imagine,
could not have imagined until wediscovered the Navalny poisoning
(08:03):
in 2020, that there had been a government program for
assassination of their own citizens.
Before that we thought, well, they occasionally like the
Mossad would do, targeting killings abroad of enemies of
the state. But then suddenly we discovered
they've had an industrial scale program for assassinating their
own people. And that cannot but leave a
(08:24):
trace in your in your sort of a moral compass.
How were you informed that this Bulgarian spy ring were after
you and probably wanted to kill you?
Well, that was the day that my life changed.
I was not informed directly because I don't think the law
(08:46):
enforcement agent who told me that knew where the danger was
coming from at that particular day and time.
I was doing a screening of the film Navalny in New York during
a short trip in early 2023, justbefore the Oscars.
And I got a call from law enforcement in the US who told
me you cannot leave back for Europe.
(09:08):
I was planning to leave that same day, that same evening.
And I said, come on, you must bekidding.
I have a ticket for tonight. Well, they said, we don't
recommend that you leave becausethere's a team waiting for you
there. I said, what kind of team would
that be? Just some cyber espionage,
somebody trying to peek into my laptop.
And they said, no, it's, it's much worse than that, but we
(09:29):
can't tell you more. So just stay here.
So I stayed there and it took a couple of weeks more before I
was told by Austrian security services that where I used to
live at the time, that it is a team of Bulgarians that have
been hired by Jan Marsalik to work in favour of Russian
security services. And again, the seriousness with
(09:51):
which Austrian security servicestold me about that implied that
there's a much more professionaloperation that had been going on
for years, but they would not tell me because I was a
potential witness in the Britishlegal proceedings.
So I I got very, very little in terms of details and I was asked
not to investigate it myself in order to not interfere with the
(10:14):
judicial process here. What did you say to your wife?
Well, at the time basically I got the the message I told you
so. And I think she was right about
that because she had told me so was.
She angry? Yeah, because the impact on your
life has been extraordinary. Just give me a sense of what it
(10:38):
has done to you. Well, it's suffice it to say
that I live a a separate life and I'm not living with my
family anymore. And that's probably for the
better from a security perspective for for my kids as
well. Do you think it was worth it?
My children think so. And I think that's a very
(10:59):
important moral compass for anyone.
If they can understand why I hadto make the sacrifice and they
had to make the sacrifice, then I think it is worth it.
But again, it's not a formula that can be applied to every
life. And it depends on where in life
you are and then what, how much you've contributed to your
(11:21):
family in the past and to your children.
And I was probably lucky that itdidn't happen earlier when my
children would have beated me much more than they do now.
It looks like your daughter's sort of followed in your
footsteps a little. My daughter actually discovered
one of the six arrested spies and I can't be prouder.
Also importantly, because she also has a right to say, I told
(11:45):
you so, she had pointed out thisman, the 6th of the arrested
spies in 2022 in the street. And she said, dad, I think
that's a spy following us. And I said, Sophia, don't try to
be like your dad. I mean, let me handle the spy
catching you. Just do your school thing.
She said, no, dad, I'm sure thathe's a spy.
(12:06):
And she snapped a photo of him. And two years later, turned out
that that photo was very, very important for proving that on
the day that this spy ring brokeinto my apartment in Vienna to
steal my laptop, the one that they thought was the laptop from
the Navalny film, that this person had been staking this out
(12:27):
outside to make sure we don't goto the apartment.
But only my daughter, who's 14 outside, had noticed that
person. Yes.
I mean, if they all had all toldyou so, you, you must have also
known really that this was a risk that you were running.
Because the people who you're friends with, the people who you
have known, whether it's Navalnyor Vladimir Karamuza, these
(12:50):
people have all been targeted too.
You're right. I mean, it was maybe a
subconscious decision to ignore,ignore the signs because if we
start living by by the signs andby fear, then we'll be
completely our hands will be tied.
So I probably fooled myself intobelieving that I'm not as
(13:11):
important for them, that they would imagine that because all
of my investigations are, are a product of group work.
I mean, I've trained many, many colleagues in the same dark arts
of data journalism, essentially.And working with databases, I
mean, doing something to me would not stop this process.
(13:33):
It's become very trendy among especially Russian journalists.
They love doing this, and they're thousands of them who
have left the country, have the freedom to work independently
from censorship. So I thought, yeah, nobody would
try to get rid of me because it would not solve the problem.
But apparently, as we find out now from the chats that have
been disclosed, I've offended Putin personally and he was a
(14:00):
driver behind this whole operation and he hates me, as
Mars, Alex said in one of the messages.
Why have you offended prison personally?
What? What is it that he's annoyed
about? I think it boils down and and
looking at exactly when this operation started, it started
the evening of the day of our publication of the Navalny
(14:21):
poisoning. It started on the 14th of
December 2020 to 20/20/20. And that was the day we
published the Navalny investigation where we
essentially pointed out this industrial scale program of of
trying to assassinate political opponents.
But we also made fun of the FSB,Putin's favorite intelligence
(14:43):
agency, because we showed their faces, we showed how easy it is
to trace them. We showed all the mistakes they
made and we had one of them confess on the phone in a 53
minute long interview to his ownvictim Navalny that they had
tried to kill him. And that really, really
(15:04):
embarrassed Putin furthermore, because he went on, on the TV
press conference to say that allof this is fake news and all of
this information is not the product of journalistic
investigation, but something that has been fed to us by
intelligence agencies, by MI 6 or CIA.
(15:26):
So that explains why for the longest time, this group of six
and many more that are part of this operation were looking for
the fictional fantastical evidence that we have some
connection to an intelligence service.
And then when they didn't find it, they were so angry that they
decided to switch to kidnapping or killing.
(15:46):
I mean, that's really interesting then.
So do you think Putin and all his acolytes genuinely believe
what they say, that you are an instrument of the CIA or?
That's a very good question. So I asked this question to the
person who recruited Yanmar Salek, the main person in charge
of this operation. In a very strange and somewhat
(16:08):
sincere phone call with this Russian recruiter spymaster, I
asked exactly this question. Do they believe this nonsense?
And he said, Cristo, I have to understand some people can sleep
much better at night if they believe their enemy is the CA,
then if they have to acknowledgethat they've been fooled by a
(16:30):
journalist. And I think that makes a lot of
sense. You embarrassed them.
Yes, yes. And it's they take that
embarrassment, they would take it with much a much softer
landing if they thought that they'd been outsmarted by this
huge enemy and not by some civilian group of journalists.
How many Russian agents have youexposed?
(16:51):
Thousands, but here's how it works.
We name. We've named probably 60.
We'd never named them unnecessarily.
We only publish their names whenthey're in the context of an
actual crime. But we have thousands in our
Excel sheets and spreadsheets. And the problem with that for
(17:16):
the Russian intelligence services, they don't know how
many we know. So they've recalled everybody
who has made ever any of these mistakes that we've identified.
So they've been taken out of. Circulation they've been taken
out well they've been brought inbrought back to Russia they
don't travel anymore but they'reused to train new new spies they
used to train these people in inthe UK who are a new type of
(17:37):
spies like hybrid spies they're they're criminals essentially
who moonlight the spies I. Mean this group in the UK we're
almost sort of comically bad. That was like a cheap version of
Ocean's 11 kind of bad. Yeah, but.
But again, that doesn't take away from the from from the risk
(17:58):
of what they could have done. And being bad at what you do
doesn't make you less dangerous.In fact, in many cases
professional spies are less dangerous, especially to in
terms of collateral damage to bystanders then such people.
These people don't know how to de escalate.
On that day when this group broke into my apartment in
(18:19):
Vienna to steal the laptop, theyhad not done their homework to
find out that my son was in his room playing a computer game and
he stayed doing that throughout their burglary.
Imagine what would have happenedif he had walked out of his
room. I don't want to think about it,
but that's something a professional spy would not have
done. So again, the the fact that they
(18:40):
were called Minias, but I call them Muppets, doesn't make them
less dangerous than professionalspies.
They tried to burn down the house that they believed
belonged to me in Bulgaria. There was just a Random House
that they had misidentified. So that is not not dangerous.
It also exposed the way they hadgone after your family and
(19:03):
perhaps your father in particular.
Can you tell me what happened and what you what you think was
behind it? I still believe and hope this is
a cosmic coincidence. But shortly after, I was warned
that I should not come back to Europe, and I made it public in
(19:24):
a interview in Austrian newspapers.
And my father actually then posted a link to that interview
on Facebook. And literally the next day, my
father stopped answering phone calls from me.
And yeah, four days later, we discovered that he was dead in
his home near Vienna. And that was treated as a
(19:47):
suspicious incident by the Austrian police.
They took his body and and did all kinds of tests for months
and we couldn't really have a funeral.
But I had kind of parked that into sort of the cold cases and
probably a coincidence section of my memory until the police
(20:11):
here showed me photographs of this team camped out in front of
my father's apartment and then doing a selfie in front of the
terrace to the apartment with anarrow saying this way in.
And this has opened up this wound again for me because I, I
cannot now not look at this as apotential, a potential, a very
(20:31):
small chance, but small probability, but still a
potential operation by others, not by this team, but held by
this team to bring me back to Austria at the time when they
knew that I would not come back in order for them to continue
with the operation. Do you believe he was murdered?
(20:51):
I don't know and I'm not sure I want to know.
That is the sort of the ultimateillustration, isn't it, of the,
the toll on you from choosing this life.
What, what do you think it tellsus about what you're up against
(21:14):
and that regime? I would like to broaden the
answer because it tells us aboutthe new reality in the world.
Because I'm afraid that what seemed to me for years to be the
shocking truth about this regimethat it only takes to explain to
the world that that's happening,that the world will be shocked
(21:37):
and will take measures to bring this regime down or to help the,
the people who are the victims. We see that becoming normalised
and and befriended by the US administration.
So I'm, I probably, that is the biggest bummer for me.
I mean, it's not that I have been able to single handedly
(21:59):
bring down Putin, which is obviously a lost cause, but it's
the fact that what used to be the biggest helper for
independent journalism, the United States with all its
resources, sanctions and, and intelligence services and the
ability to do cyber counter attacks and stuff that is
(22:22):
essentially being put to the service of Russia now.
So if anything, the value of what I do and what my colleagues
do, what Roman Dombrojotov does,increases significantly because
is going to come during a shortfall in what used to be
done by governments before. So what?
What do you think that kind of exposure is achieving or could
(22:44):
achieve? Well, it does mobilize the good
people around the world. I mean, people default to, by
definition, the best of people default to the least amount of
information they can live with so that they don't have to
worry. And it takes bringing and
(23:06):
showing them and pointing them and convincing them of the
injustice around them for them to start worrying.
And I think this is what this does it.
It just brings to the fore in the West the granular details of
how cruel this regime is and also shows the danger to the
Western world of this home of, of, of this very regime
(23:30):
overstepping physically the boundaries of of their
operations to come, come over and do The Dirty work here.
When you say this kind of journalism is increasingly
popular, particularly in Russia,do you think those people are
taking the same kinds of risks as you?
I think they're taking you a bigger risks because they cannot
(23:52):
even imagine going back to theirown homes anymore.
They have to live a life of exiles and they didn't
necessarily choose that. I mean, for me, it was a choice.
It was a conscious choice. They were they were pushed into
that just because they couldn't do proper journalism.
The only thing that they wanted to do and stay in Russia, they,
(24:13):
the moment they published anything resembling journalism,
they would have been jailed and and ended up maybe even killed.
So they had to leave the countryand many of them went to the
United States. I might want to belabour the
point, but many of them went to the United States and now
they're faced with another dilemma like are they saved
there? In fact, their visas are
(24:34):
expiring and they they may not be renewed.
So I think the Russian colleagues are taking even
bigger risks. What What was your first big
exposure? But where was the moment you
realized what you were doing or what you're on to?
I would say that, well, the first big expose was on the
disinformation campaign around the Downing of a Malaysian
Airlines MH 17, which I published on Bellingcat in 2015.
(24:58):
The first real investigation that showed that you can do
these things that only intelligence agencies we thought
were able to or even better thanthey was.
When I helped identify the voices or the names behind the
voices of several Russian officers behind the Downing of
MH 17 that were published by theDutch investigators with a call
(25:21):
for action saying we can't identify these people.
Can you, the world help us? And we jumped on that with
again, such an adrenaline rush when the government says they
can't do something. I would say that was the first
one that proved to me and to my colleagues we can be better than
than government intelligence services.
Similarly, when the British police that Mets published the
(25:43):
faces of two random Russians saying who are these people?
Because we think these names arefake, we felt again the same
adrenaline Russia. And I did, and it I discarded
everything else I was doing for two months until I found who
they were and we published the names.
And it it it it derived enormoushappiness from being better than
(26:05):
governments. So again, how did you identify
them? Just talk.
Take us through the sequence. Well, I wish we had the time for
that, but first identification was to prove that these people
don't exist. And this is relatively easy with
the volume of data leaking out of Russia.
You have databases of residential records, of
passports that go back 20 years.And when you look at the name,
(26:29):
look for a name in that databaseand find that it only suddenly
appears in 2015, but it didn't exist before, it's easy to know
that this is a fake identity. I mean, you don't get born at
age 37, right? So we knew immediately that
these names don't exist because they don't exist in all
databases. But then finally, who they
really were took a good three months of work.
(26:51):
And in one case we were lucky because we were able to find a
face matching the face of one ofthese poisoners on the wall of
wall of fame of a military institute in eastern part of
Russia, where he had been calledour hero, Our military hero,
(27:13):
having achieved so many exploitsaround the world.
And that was the same face of ofthe person.
When you say you've managed to find the face, are you using
some very sophisticated softwareto?
Redraw use face face search software.
But in that particular case, it just took countless hours of
going through literal Facebooks of like school yearbooks of the
(27:39):
most likely universities in Russia that would have trained
spies. We started with that.
We asked which would be the military institutes that would
train undercover spies, elite spies, and we had only two that
would have likely generated thisoutput of spies in the late 90s.
So we went through hours and hours of footage, graduation
(28:01):
photos and, and in this particular case, it was an
alumnus from that in institute who had gone through the whole
campus with his camera and posted it on YouTube and was
showing everything that was on the walls.
And in one instance, he's walking by a wall of fame.
And we just noticed this guy looks like that guy who's made a
(28:23):
forensic comparison of the two faces and it was a match of 97%.
Well, so when you look at what is now called mainstream
journalism, popular journalism, do you do you find yourself
thinking you could do so much more?
They have started doing so much more.
I think the dawn of realization that open source is a totally
(28:47):
mis misused or underused the source of information.
That was about seven or eight years ago.
And both journalists started implementing those tricks and
tools into their newsroom, but also intelligence services that
previously didn't they, they thought that was kind of a the,
the poor relation of, of investigations because it's free
(29:11):
and they liked using their clothes sources.
There's, there's their informants.
But both journalists started doing that and and intelligence
agents started doing that. I do sometimes still find a bulk
at the at, at at seeing how men,some mainstream media still
report what a source told them where I see so many easy ways
(29:34):
for them to validate that through data, but they just stop
at that. We were told, and this is what
we report. And I think that's that's falls
short of the demands of journalism.
So I mean, you are now a target and you've been warned and you
(29:54):
know for a fact that people havebeen out to get you.
I mean, do you get any help? Do you have protection?
Do you, you know, are you, are you, are you on your own or or
do you have support? I I do have general support.
I have moral support when I'm inthe United States.
I, I get advised of the risk sort of factor as it changes.
(30:19):
I cannot safely go back to Austria unless I'm accompanied
by a whole team of bodyguards atany given time and and I'm
advised not to go to the rest ofEurope.
So that's kind of the limitationthat I have to the.
Whole of Europe. The whole of Continental.
(30:39):
Europe you can't go to. I'm advised not to.
It's too easy for Russian spies or their Muppets to travel
around the continent without leaving a trace.
And so is Britain relatively safe because of border controls?
Exactly. Yeah, because of the new and
more intelligent border controls.
Because border controls exist in2018.
(31:02):
But somebody let these fake identities get visas to the UK.
Somebody let these sequential passports with 0 history behind
them enter the country and poison the scribble family and
kill an innocent bystander. That was the wrong, unsafe
(31:23):
Britain. And I'm told that has changed.
Do you feel by raising your headas you are now in a documentary,
in interviews you know your highprofile?
Are you increasing your risk or are you protecting yourself?
I think that the risk is has peaked and I don't think I can
(31:44):
offend put in twice and they don't forget.
These people don't forget. So I think the question is
wrong. The question is, what is the
best usage of my time now that Iknow that the risk is at its
peak and it's to speak out? So you will carry on.
I'm carrying on. And and and will you turn your
(32:07):
attention to other regimes as well?
Or when you say this has become ideological for you, do you feel
a moral duty to focus on this one?
Well, my belief is that again, when I was a kid, I remember
seeing this Bulgarian film in which a kid asked their mother,
(32:28):
Mum, why do you tell me that I should not befriend bad kids,
bad students at school Because I'll become like them.
Why don't they become like me? And I think that's the general
problem in in the world that I think the example that is said
by Putin of, of the impunity andbeing able to get away with
(32:50):
anything and enrich yourself in the process is a perfect
template, a model for so many other governments around the
world, including the United States at this point in time.
And I think that if by any miracle we're able to defeat
that regime, that example will prove to be non sustainable,
(33:11):
unsustainable. And I think that in itself will
help the whole world, not just Russia or, or the Russians
rather. And that's why I think I should
continue doing what I can do best, which is identify Russian
spies, getting them jailed, and maybe in the end trade them for
good Russians that are in jail in Russia.
(33:34):
There is a very striking exampleof precisely that isn't there in
your life. Could you tell me about that
example and how it felt to have a, you know, a man you know is a
murderer released? It's one of the hardest moral
choices I've ever had to make inmy life.
I in 2019, I helped identify thethe murderer in in a political
(34:01):
assassination that took place inBerlin.
And the murderer was an FSB officer who killed a Chechen
Georgian asylum seeker who was trying to get asylum in Germany
at the time. In broad daylight, we identified
the murderer. It took all of the tricks of our
(34:21):
trade to prove that he was not who he said he was and to prove
his affiliation with the Russianintelligence services.
And I was brought in as an expert witness by the German
prosecutors, and it was largely based on my testimony that the
court accepted that he was a state murderer and jailed him
for life. Just remind me of his name.
(34:42):
His name was Vladimir Krasikov. I stayed three days in court and
three days I was stared down by this killer from his cubicle.
And that was a cold stare that Istill remember to today.
And years later when I had realized in the meantime, his
personally, his importance personally to President Putin
(35:02):
because we found that he was hispersonal assassin and bodyguard
and so on and so forth. And Putin himself made very,
very strong state statements publicly that he wants him back
and he wants him free. We knew that that's the biggest
value that the West holds in terms of a trading card in order
for a release of all of the Russian prisoners or or Western
(35:24):
prisoners in Russian jails. And it started with Navalny,
because Navalny at that time wascritically ill in jail.
And we needed to find something to offer to put into trade and
for together with other political prisoners.
And there were several Americansalso and Westerners in Russian
jails. So I started working on this
back channel multilateral negotiation to try to get
(35:48):
Navalny out, to try to get Vladimir Karamuza out, who was
also jailed at the time, to try to get Ivan Gerskovich, the Wall
Street Journal reporter was jailed.
And I knew that the one thing that could help all of these
people get out was the man put in wanted back.
And even though there was a hardmoral choice because he was a
killer and the family of the killed person in, in in Germany,
(36:12):
they didn't want him to walk free.
And I, I totally understand why,but I still thought that it's
better to have the people who are still alive and could pose a
problem political problem for Putin and could give hope to the
other Russians that there can bea change for them to be free and
alive than for the abstract justice of keeping this guy in
(36:36):
jail for, for life to, to endure.
So I, I recommend it for this swap.
And ultimately it happened, but it was a very hard choice.
What is your feeling now about the strength of Putin in Russia
and whether there is grounds forhope from your point of view?
(36:58):
I think Putin suddenly feels reinvigorated and validated
because of the United States position again.
I mean, for the first time, voting alongside with Russia in
in history that I remember is something that he internalizes
as his own victory. But I think empires tend to fail
(37:22):
and fall whenever there's a sense of complacency.
And I think Putin is getting to the point of being complacent.
So I'm really hopeful. You never know how an empire is
going to fall. They always fall in a most
unpredictable way. But I do think that this sense
of complacency and, and as we see even in the case of the six
(37:43):
pies here, a system built aroundhim that misinforms him, that
wants to tell him what he wants to, to hear.
We see throughout this three-year, 2 1/2 year operation
that they've been lining up the food chain, lining up the
pyramid by providing fake explanations and and success
stories have never happened. I think it is this that will be
(38:06):
the undoing of Putin. He lives in a bubble.
He thinks there's no risk for him at this point and the risk
will pop up unexpectedly to him.So how easy is it for you to be
an optimist? I'm an optimist and I think in
the long run I've been proven tobe right.
(38:29):
So it's it's not hard. It's not hard.
I mean, being an optimist is theonly thing that can explain why
I'm doing what I'm doing. So it's easy.
Krista Grosje, thank you very much indeed.
Thank you. Thank you for sharing your story
and I hope you found that as fascinating as I did.
If you did, then give us a rating or a review and then
other people will find the ways to change the world.
(38:49):
Podcast. Our producer is Sylvia Maresca.
Until next time, bye bye.
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