Previously on hot money.

He would probably be interested to take the Russian side, because for him, Russia would be acting properly and more correct than the West.

For example, I would say that we are actually at the doorstep of a new ideological war where discounts again as a motive for becoming an agent, for becoming an informer, because you want to contribute in this geopolitical power struggle going on between East and West.

It was a bitterly cold morning in February twenty eighteen in Vienna.

The snow in the gutters and on the rooftops had hardened into gray ice.

At a busy intersection on the outskirts of the city stand two tall white stucco buildings set at a right angle to each other, over decorated with pediments and such in the usual Viennese imperial style.

Between the two buildings is a huge armored gray gate.

There's no sign, no indication at all of what this place is, just a small plaque that tells you its property managed by the government.

But every window is mirrored in dark blue iridescent glass.

This is the BVT, the bundes Ampt feuva fassen Schutz on Terorrismus BEKEMPHL, Austria's intelligence agency.

At first it seemed like a routine visit.

The buzzer for the outer gate sounded and the duty watchman saw the image of a single individual dressed in civilian clothes flicker up on his screen.

The visitor holds up a police ID badge and he says he has a meeting in the building.

The watchman flicks a switch to operate the first gate, and the policeman swings through the big iron single person turnstile, steps into a gray room on the other side, and it's at this point that things take an unexpected turn.

The man the watchman, just let in.

He's no ordinary policeman.

He slams past two officers in the little gray room and through the open door of the guardhouse control room and demands the master key.

He's here under orders from the Ministry of Justice, he says, acting on behalf of the Anti Corruption Bureau, and he's got a warrant.

Under pressure the duty watchman, he folds, this was not in his training.

He gives the policeman the master key.

The gray gate swings open and then at speed from places hidden on side streets, not far from the gates, vans scream into action and drive into the courtyard.

Inside the vans are dozens of police officers wearing balaclavas.

They get out and they pour into the building.

This is the day that Austria's intelligence service was on the brink of being hijacked by a foreign power, a foreign power working so deeply in the shadows that it turned the Austrian security services against each other.

What would unfold reveals how seemingly small acts of misdirection and slow manipulation can compromise the national security of a whole country, a kind of intelligence operation that Russia is very good at, and that it's put to use on a decade long campaign to manipulate Europe's far right for its own ends.

The person behind what happened that day in Vienna is someone whose name you know well by now, Jan Marselek.

I'm Sam Jones from the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries.

This is Hot Money Season three, Agent of Chaos, Episode six, Maestro.

To learn more about what happened that day at the BVT, I sat down with Peter Gridling.

He served as Austria's intelligence chief, the head of the BVT for more than a decade.

What makes a good intelligence officer.

Interest, first of all, interest in developments, interest in following up things.

A certain feeling because whenever you see that something happens, you'll never know how this will develop.

That feeling is that sort of would you say intuition, I mean, I suppose what you've got often in this world is only a few small bits of evidence.

It's never the whole picture.

And what you're talking about is the ability to see the links between them exactly.

It's often.

Peter is careful when he talks, deliberate, disinclined to make definitive statements.

Even for a career spy, He's remarkably taciturn He was the man in charge when the raid on the bvt's headquarters, the biggest disaster in the organization's history, took place.

A year before the raid, in twenty seventeen, nine years into Peter's post, something strange happened.

A thirty nine page dossier was mailed to politicians, police, and a group of Austrian journalists, A dossier of accusations against the BVT, including against Peter.

The dossier listed examples of alleged corruption incompetence and conspiracy within the BVT.

It also painted a picture of an organization that was conspiring to keep Austria's far right Freedom Party out of power.

You might remember the Freedom Party because they're the ones that ended up in an Abethan Villa, appearing to make deals with someone posing as a Russian oligarch's niece, all caught on tape.

The dossier was also spiced with lurid details of sex parties that the BVT for good measure.

Peter was baffled about where all these allegations came from.

Although the detailed knowledge the dossier contained about the bvt's personnel and operations made Peter think it might be an insider.

I only had the opinion that it must be someone on a higher level who has inside in Pavit.

The claims are so fantastical, though, that Peter feels he won't have too much trouble pushing back against them.

When I read the allegations, I thought this is stupid, and I offered myself to provide documentation that this is stupid.

That isn't anything.

Yeah, but things get a little more complicated when a new government is formed.

The Freedom Party gained control of the Interior Ministry.

The Interior Ministry is like the Department of Homeland Security or the Home Office.

It's the department that's in charge of the security services.

So the Freedom Party are now in control of the BVT.

The problem is that dossier.

It's seeded distrust, and the Freedom Party are now paranoid that they're under threat from the BVT.

It's a bit like how Trump and the MAGA movement have seemed to feel about the FBI, convinced that powerful figures within the agency had been conspiring against them.

This all sounds quite tricky for Peter.

He's a pragmatist, though, and prosecutors don't take further action, so he pushes it all to one side and hopes it'll go away.

But it turns out that this is only the start.

I never had an indication of what kind of problems would come up, and so the twenty eighth of February twenty eighteen was an absolute surprise.

When police swarm into the BVT on that cold winter's morning, Peter Gridling is not in his office.

He's across town with his boss, the Secretary General of the Interior Ministry, an urgent meeting.

The Secretary General informed me that there are also investigations against me.

He presented to me the written allegation against me, which was what which was that I have misused my authority to cases once I have not ordered the deletion of data, and once I had allowed the storage of data which was illegally obtained.

And both of the cases were nonsense.

But I had the impression that at this early stage of the official investigation, the prosecutor was not really interested.

They listened to me, they gave me a chance to explain, but they didn't really listen to what I said or look at the documentation that I offered to provide.

Peter realizes that this is all linked back to that anonymous dossier.

Previously, prosecutors had dismissed the allegations about the BVT, but now they seemed to be taking them seriously.

After all, we knew that the information based on the anonymous letters was never enough for the judiciary to take measures.

What has changed in the meantime that suddenly that.

Was when he finally gets out of the meeting, Peter speaks with panicked colleagues.

They tell him what happened two miles away at the bvt's headquarters.

It sounds like it was chaos.

It seems like police didn't even really know what they were looking for.

They went from room to room in the building indiscriminately snatching up documents.

But the BBT offices are labyrinthine, and since the whole layout of this building and everything about it a secret, no one even really knew where to go.

Did they know what they were looking for?

Was it specific or they just that was not very prepared.

When you don't know what you look for, you will never find the information that you look for.

If you want to seize electronic information, you should know something about the organization and the ID in order to be prepared and not to come in and say where are your computers, sir so.

But then one police squad they inadvertently do something disastrous.

They barge into the IT department itself.

This is the moment that the raids and shockwaves beyond the BVT, beyond Austria even unfortunately.

One officer in the IDA was preparing for the annual backup after in deligence system.

That's why he had a hard disk on his stableute which contained sensitive in delicence and this hard disk was taken.

In fact, it was probably one of the most sensitive things that the BVT has in its possession.

This hard disk doesn't just contain BVT intelligence, but also intelligence shared under strict secrecy by partner agencies from all over the world, classified documents from the CIA from Britain's MI five.

Peter and the senior leadership of the BVT go into crisis mode that afternoon and it becomes pretty clear that they're going to have to get in touch with their allies and tell them what has just happened.

It was a shock well and was clearly expressed that are badness that this influences Tick Corporation because b ray not Abra could protect their interest.

I can't imagine those were comfortable conversations.

No one likes to have to call up a friend and tell them that the thing they entrusted to you something secret and sensitive, well it's no longer a secret.

Only in this situation lives could be at risk, details of sensitive operations, potential information that could identify agents.

The consequences are pretty dire.

Austria becomes an intelligence pariah when it's frozen out of the club, a top secret club, the Clube de bern can you explain what the Klube de Bern is?

No?

The Clube de Bern is a pan European intelligence network named after the Swiss capital of Bern.

Its workings are highly secret officially, it has no secretariat, no physical presence.

All of Europe's spy chiefs are members and gather for secret meetings several times a year to discuss the most pressing issues on their agendas.

And members of the club, they use their resources to make sure other members are safe, so not a good thing to be kicked out of.

To add insult to injury, this ostracism, it becomes public knowledge.

Someone leaks a communication that the club has sent to its members.

The document's header reads to all except BEVT Vienna.

The Austrian media have a field day.

Peter's own situation meanwhile, gets worse.

The Interior Ministry suspends him and he finds himself questioning everything, wondering how things have fallen apart so quickly?

Is there anything that you have done wrong?

And your thoughts of cost to you some nights, sir.

What he doesn't realize yet is that there is more going on beneath the surface, because all of this is being orchestrated by Jan Marselek and his associates.

Peter Griddling couldn't stop turning everything over in his head.

Why had the anonymous allegations made against him and the BVT suddenly been taken seriously?

He might never have found the answer to that question or understood the events that led to the raid, had there not been an unexpected change of government in Austria in twenty nineteen.

The year after the raid happened, the Abetha scandal erupted and the far right Freedom Party they got kicked out of government.

The new government it ordered a police inquiry into what became known as the BVT affair.

A special investigatory group was set up called Urgay Farmer Farmer from the Greek word for rumors Ourgae Farmer started out investigating the BVT affair, but what it found out led it to switch its focus to Jan Marselek.

The first thing investigators wanted to get to grips with were the events that had led to the raid itself.

What they soon found out was that days before the raid, a crucial piece of written evidence had landed on the desk of the anti corruption prosecutor in Vienna.

It was a witness statement sworn testimony from one of the most senior employees of the BVT, and it seemed to confirm that those anonymous allegations from the previous year were true after all, that some kind of conspiracy was underway, that the BVT was working to undermine the far right Freedom Party, and this witness it was the bvt's head of operations, one of the agency's most powerful figures, one of Peter's deputies.

That was Martinvice.

And how would you describe Martin Wece.

One of my biggest disappointments.

Peter and Martin Weiss had worked closely together for more than twenty five years.

It was even more than the professional relationship.

It was kind of friendship.

That's why I was really very disappointed.

About him, because he betrayed you.

That was my feeling.

Yeah, Peter couldn't understand why Wess would have done this.

They'd had a disagreement at work the year before, but nothing serious.

Peter had put his foot down about something, so maybe Wes was still angry with him.

But as Peter turned all of this over in his head, he began to wonder if this was more than just a workplace grievance.

Because he also learned the name of the person investigators suspected of writing the original dossier, someone who happened to know Martin Weiss well.

E.

Gisto Ott, a burly, no nonsense former police inspector with a varied career working for the BVT in counter terrorism around Europe.

He's a complicated personality and in teams was always a problem with him.

He could not be integrae.

Ot had been on Peter's radar earlier for an entirely different reason.

Peter had suspended him and reported him for suspected sponage.

Peter said he'd been tipped off by a partner agency, a major ally, who told him they had evidence A.

Gisto was a traitor, and it.

Went back to his time in Turkey, where he, according to a source of the Batma service, he had many contacts with Russian diligence officers, so there was the suspicion that he got cultivated there and that might be the case that he has worked for Russians here in Vienna.

Investigators thought there could be a Russian angle to the BVT story too, and in January twenty twenty one they arrested Ott and Vice both later got released, but only after investigators had made copies of all their digital records and searched their houses.

After Martin Weis was released, he disappeared.

He left Austria and moved to Dubai.

We tried to reach him but couldn't get in touch.

In his interviews with police, Weiss always denied having worked for Russia.

I also spent months trying to contact a Gisto OT, and then right before we were due to release this episode, I finally managed to reach him.

Juel Hello, a Gisto.

He is Sam Jones Vonda Financial Times.

Ah, Hello, Do to you mind if we speak in English?

Is because speaker is illege?

But I beg your bardin if my English is.

Not the best.

Ot is half Italian and Italian, he tells me.

Is his mother tongue German, second English.

Third.

He spent his life working for Austrian police and intelligence in various locations around Europe.

Most of what he did is secret, but we do know that Ot worked on uncovering the fascist letter bomber Franz Fuchs in the nineteen nineties.

Ot is proud of his career and he's deeply frustrated by the investigations against him.

It's I guess he is the big spy for Russia.

He denies this.

I'm working for Russia's But where's the evidence.

There's no alidence.

What says that his lawyers have demanded four times to see the evidence that backed up Peter's claim he was working for the Russians, the one that led to Peter suspending him in twenty seventeen before the raid even took place, but it hasn't been provided.

And Ot thinks that Peter has just made it up.

Do you have got any from me?

Mm hmm from so?

Do you think that he was lying?

He made it up.

Exactly because he cannot He cannot say the truth, because he cannot say, okay, this was only bullshit, this was only a storytelling by me.

He says.

It's the same with the accusation that he is the author of the thirty nine page dossier, the one that led to the raid.

I didn't write him.

There's no evidence.

The only writing story.

Ott says.

This whole thing isn't about Russia.

He says the BVT themselves, in cahoots with members of the Austrian political establishment, set the whole thing up.

The raid was basically their plan all along, and that they did it in order to discredit Austria's far right by making it look like they'd caused this mess only months after they'd been given control of Austria's security services for the first time.

In Ott's version of events, Austria was suspended from the Clube de Burn not because of the raid, but because Peter Griddling secretly asked for the suspension, specifically to create bad press about Austria.

So you mean you think that Peter asked the Clube de Bern to suspend the belief of tea.

Exactly even reaped the witnesses.

Let's get did It's normally called m HM like high trees and exactly.

I should note here that we haven't seen any evidence to support this claim.

And Peter Gridling, he denies ever having done anything like this.

What admits that he and Martin Wess they were close and they did regularly discuss what they saw as big problems at the BVT because they thought it was in the pocket of the Austrian political establishment.

He thinks he and Vice were framed as the provocateurs responsible for the raid precisely because they'd complained about corrupt activities at the BVT in the past.

Ahadi are saying, we are corrupt.

Oh, very beautiful.

Now all of this is getting a little bit smoke and mirrors.

The thing is, there's a reason why the cloud of suspicion isn't so easily dispersed from around a Gisto despite his protests.

It's because he and Martin Wece they both knew they both worked for someone else.

My memory, he was a very very smart, tough, smart young good truths.

The story that is out there that's different to yours is that actually this guy yan Marcelek is behind this, and that he was using you and Martin Weiss to try and manipulate the ministry and gain control of the beef Ati.

This is this is this is not this is not true because I think.

Nothing about about basic because we haven't haven't been used for it for and something.

No, it's it's not true.

What admits that he knew jan Marcelek, but in his telling he only ever really did a little bit of freelancing for him.

What says the reason he knew marcelect was because Martin Weiss, who was close to had gone to work for Marceilek.

In fact, Wesce even had an office of his own in prince Ygentenstrasser, and one day Wesce asked Ott to help create a wire tap proof room there.

What did Martin tell you about Marcelect?

Did he ever talk about who this guy was?

It's only only yeah, he's a is he ill and smartsh a lot.

When you found out or heard, I guess read in the newspapers that Marcelect had disappeared and wire Card had gone bankrupt, did you do anything?

What was your reaction?

This was it was on this day in these days, I think it was a two twenty.

Yeah, when they came out, it was even surprised.

Did you tell anyone that you'd been to his house and had this?

You know, he wanted a secret room.

No, Marcelect had just become one of the most wanted men in Europe, suspected of being a Russian spy.

It seems strange to me that wouldn't mention to anyone that he knew Marcelect.

But then again, this is what he told me when I asked him who he thought Jan Marcelekt really was.

Do you think he's a Russian spy or do you think he has other interests?

I don't think so, at least in Russia spy, I don't think.

So Ot rejects all the allegations about his role in the BVT affair and says he definitely wasn't a Russian agent, but he actually sympathizes with the objective of the plot.

He says he wishes the Freedom Party had kicked out Griddling and completely reformed the BVT, and that Russia's threat to Europe is overblown.

On the contrary, he thinks that there are powerful hawks in the West, he calls them eagles, trying to stoke tensions with Moscow by confecting all of these scandals.

Just so, you were a counterintelligence officer at the BFLT for a long time in your career.

What do you think is Russia a threat to Austria?

No, I think there are some.

Let's say some ees here in the in the Western part and even in Austria and in the in the European Union.

I think it really he won't they have the Third World War.

I'm so happy that there was born in sixty two and that he drew up very peaceful.

Even my kids have grown up very peaceful and they won't even but my grinsons became drew up before the war, and now we have more than eighty years that they don't.

There's no reason that the Russia, the European Union, or a deck Austria, what.

Is not alone in this view of Russia in Austria or elsewhere in Central Europe.

I hear it a lot, of course, like all pieces of good what aboutism, there's truth in it.

The last thirty years have involved a lot of big wars started by hawkish politicians in the West.

But Russia is no paragon of peace.

And you might feel rather differently about Putin's threat to Europe if you were sat in Tallinn or Vilnius or Riga, European capitals that Russia very much believes belong within its sphere of control.

The idea that Russia is a good neighbor, it's just not remotely true.

Ott was charged with breaching state secrecy in November twenty twenty four.

The trial I'll open this March, and three days later he was acquitted.

Prosecutors are considering further charges.

There's a reason why espionage trials are so rare, because trying to prove someone as a spy is not like proving any other crime.

Everything can hinge on almost impossible to answer questions of motive and awareness.

I can't tell you what really did or didn't know about Yan Marcelet's involvement in the BBT affair, but I can tell you that there is more evidence to weigh in the case than just his perspective versus Peter Gridlings.

Peter, in any case, isn't under investigation, and he retired at twenty twenty.

Over the last five years, our Gaia Farmer's investigators have been slowly amassing a trove of evidence, pulling in more and more witnesses, gaining access to more and more messages from suspects phones on the trail of what the BVT raid was all about, and on the trail of Yan Marcelow.

And I just so happened to know somebody who has access to a lot of that evidence, Stephie Crisper.

The evidence that led to the raid was incredibly weak and should have never have led to this raid to happen, and we are still suffering from this raid.

You might remember Stephie from one of our earlier episodes.

She's the Austrian MP and a member of the two special parliamentary committees that were set up to get to the bottom of what happened.

Not only did Steffie have access to the classified information regarding the BVT affair, she also had access to the classified information surrounding Austria's far right Freedom Party their links to Russia.

If you have so many people being somewhare critical of the institution to work in, it's dangerous because it makes them also be receptible for corruption or working for other people's interests.

And that's what we realize that it's really happened, because we know nowadays that Marcelek was able to find people in this institution BFO TEE that are open for working with him so against interests of Austria.

Stephie was in a position to see the three sides of this plot.

She knew that investigators believed Ott had manufactured the first dossier despite his denials.

Weiss had then provided Sworn's secret testimony to substantiate it and trigger the raid, and Marcelek well.

Steffie also found out that Marcelek had been playing the role of conductor Maestro.

Stephie had gave and access to messages exchanged between senior members of the Freedom Party and people at the top of the Austrian Russian Friendship Society, among them Jan Marcelek.

In these messages, Yan presented himself as a BVT insider who was offering solutions on how the Freedom Party might try and reform Austria's security apparatus, which he agreed was operating as a deep state against the interests of far right politicians.

Carefully and slowly, Yan floated the idea of creating a new intelligence agency to replace the corrupt BVT.

Some in the Freedom Party were so interested in this idea that they even began drawing up policy papers on how to achieve it.

The plan was that this new agency it would be run by reliable people, and this Yan he knew exactly who the right people might be.

After seeing the evidence, Stephi is sure that none of this happened by chance, and that Marceilek was undoubtedly an advancing a plan.

The raid was just the first step.

I think that he could use any allegations to push for something like a raid to happen, for him to be able to say now we formed the whole thing, and for him to put then their people there are not objectively the best and the most competent, but.

The people controlled by the FP, the f as in the Freedom Party of Austria.

And then I guess that makes sense for Martial k because those people are also his people.

In this instance, exactly.

What would that have meant for Austria?

Do you think to have an intelligence agency that was basically controlled by FB appointees or people close to them.

It would have been logically terrible because you would have an intelligence service that does not workick in a competent way for the interests of the security of people living in Austria, but for foreign interests.

Because from the perspective of Putin, what would be great to have in Europe a country as a door to infiltrate whole Europe?

And there install your people, and the best would be to have them in ministries, even better in the security area, in the intelligence service.

And this is what I think started to happen via Marsalk having his people in the BFOT who were perhaps only frustrated, perhaps only useful idiots, to be a source for informations and perhaps on the long run also for changing the world work and the focus of work in the intelligence service in the interest of Russia, away from Russia to only other issues.

Put In doesn't bother.

But it's quite scary how close that came to maybe being a reality.

It is.

There's a way you can look at all of this and think, as plots go, this all seems pretty fragile.

A lot of people needed to believe the right thing at the right moment for this plan to work.

When we think of spyplots in movies, they're always so engineered, and sure, intelligence often does work like that.

But what Russia is also very good at is influence operations, which by their nature are more exploratory, harder to grasp.

And that's what we have here.

I think Marcelek operating for himself and for the Russians as a highly successful agent of influence.

Back in the Cold War, Russian intelligence experts talked about this idea of something called reflexive control.

It's a Russian military idea as much as it is a spying one, the premise of which is to avoid forcing someone to do something, don't hold a gun to their head.

The optimum solution is for they themselves to choose to do it, because you have so shaped their reality that they don't even realize that the free will they're exercising is what you want to Stoking paranoia in the Freedom Party has given Russia a huge leverage to interfere in Austrian politics, a trick they have repeated elsewhere in Europe too.

And maybe the lesson from this part of the story is that I think marceilllek is pretty good at doing this kind of thing.

Peter Gridling, he seems to feel the same.

Have you ever in your career come across an agent like Jan Marshal k Urse?

Something is does he compare to anything you've seen before?

Or from my experience, I have no comparison.

We will see what evidence is produced.

But if you want to guess about how worse would an intelligence asset like Marcell G be, then you would say, well, were very.

Worthy, very very valuable.

As a.

But it turns out that marcele X's skills extended way beyond operations of influence, as Austrian investigators soon began to discover for themselves because as they unraveled who all the people connected to Marcelec were, they turned up more and more leads beyond Austria.

Marcell XX very effective Vienna Network.

Well, it wasn't the only group of agents he ran.

There was at least one more.

They carried out multiple covert operations and they were based in the UK.

Coming up on Hot Money.

Marthleck really was like a sort of ghost storm to this trial.

He was clearly the organizing mind and he was there, you know, in black and white in telegram messages.

First of all, I thought someone might have been murdered, but I did think, well, there's no ambulances or anything, and there's no police cars, and then I saw these men or women or black with bile.

Clark was on.

Hot Money is a production of The Financial Times and Pushkin Industries.

It was written and reported by me Sam Jones.

The senior producer and co writer is Peggy Sutton.

Our producer is Izzy Carter.

Our research is Marine Saint.

Our show is edited by Karen Shakergie fact checking by Kira Levine, Sound design and mastering by Jake Gorsky and Marcelo de Olivia, with additional sound design by Izzy Carter.

The 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 Ruler Calaffe, Dan McCrumb, Laura Clark, Alistair Mackie, Manuela Saragosa, Nigel Hanson, Vicky Merrick, Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Jake Flanagan, Jacob Goldstein, Sarah Nix and Greta Cohne.

I'm Sam Jones