Pushkin previously on Hot Money.

I don't know.

It's a kind of almost like a Sharon Stone moment from Basic Instinct.

You know the plot of Basic Instinct where she she murders her husband.

But that's also the plot of the book she's written, so it couldn't possibly be true.

Do you know about this life sized Trump figure in the office and his marshal's office and his altar of Russian officers kept Yeah, those heads.

Yeah.

I think the biggest tragedy of Jan Marzialek is he probably could have earned millions gazillions with his charm and his wit and his business cumin and his skills, that he didn't need to be.

What he turned out to be.

This is Porta Cule, which is the kind of marina in the center of Monaco, just below the ward of Monte Carlo.

The hills kind of rise up on either side around it, the casino on the left and on the right up there as the old town and the royal palace, and all along the edges of the marina here are huge boats.

I'm in Monaco on the Codazure in the south of France.

You're not spotting with my former editor Paul Murphy.

Yeah, that's a big one.

I know.

It's a big s Yeah, that one's really that must be sixty or something.

Yeah, well then okay, yeah, this one is a small cruise ship.

Paul covered finance in London for years and he knows this part of the world pretty well.

A sunny place for shady people.

You know, you come here because this is sort of a nowhere place in a way.

You know, it's a fantasy world playground.

Well, there are specific reasons people do come here.

Up.

You know, there's text, right, because there isn't any income text right, There's security is quite important.

Security because they won't be snooped on or I think that's what I but also just kind of old fashioned.

Won't get robbed, right, won't get in there.

Yeah.

I mean it's just a place where money talks, isn't it.

It's also been in recent years the place where wealthy Russians come to summer, even now with most of the country's oligarchs under European sanctions, it's packed full of Russian visitors.

Not that you'd be able to tell that from the marina, where on a balmy June evening super yacht after super yacht is lined up getting hosed down by its crew.

Almost all of them are flying a Maltese flag, not because they're from Malta, but because you can register ownership of your yacht there anonymously.

This is a place where the super rich can remain under the radar and live by their own rules, which might bring someone to mind.

You know.

On the three occasions I had lunch with Yan Marslek in London, well, first two in London, the third one in Munich, he would always choose the most expensive lunching venue.

Marslik is attracted to kind of over wealth, displays of over wealth.

It clearly is always liked to rub shoulders with the super rich, and this is a great place to do it and as such a natural place for the Marslek to appear.

And before the collapse of Wildcard, Yan Masslek was here on the Kuda's often socializing, carousing and hanging out with lots of Russians.

There's one year during this period in his life that seems to have particular relevance twenty fourteen, the year Russia first invaded Ukraine and the year some say a transformative thing happened to Marcelect down here in the sun.

The most significant and secretive thing that can happen in the life of a spy the moment he may have chosen to really dedicate himself to serving Russia's interests.

At the time, most Europeans were growing more afraid, more wary of Russia's intentions, more skeptical of the Kremlin's interest in peace.

But Marcelek, a young, talented and successful European businessman, went the other way.

I think some people end up spies, traitors against their better interests.

They get tricked into serving someone else's cause.

Some spies get seduced into it, and some spies get blackmailed, but some they do it beca because they want to, because they believe in something, a loyal to something, and they are the perfect spies.

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

This is Hot Money, Agent of Chaos, Episode five, A different set of rules.

The most widely reported story of how Marslek was recruited by Russia is set just a few miles away from Monaco in the Port at Nice.

It's a moment that could reveal some clues as to why he chose his path so I went to see the spot.

I mean, we're standing just like meters from the stern of one of these yachts, and could have just been one like this where they would have just been sat there, you know, around a table, having drinks or whatever.

Talking for Natalia's thirtieth birthday.

Natalia's lobina, a glamorous woman Jan Maslek was dating while also dating his long term girlfriend in Munich.

Natalia is Russian, there isn't too much information available about her.

Many of her records have been blanked from Russian state databases.

One thing I can say about her is that in her youth she appeared in a schlocky semi pornographic lesbian vampire flick called Red Lips two Bloodlust, and in this film, Natalia plays the role of a KGB assassin who murders her victims with a deadly nerve agent, which, apart from the murdering, is perhaps a particularly curious case of art prefiguring life, because by the time her thirtieth birthday rolled around, she had developed close connections to Russia's intelligence services.

It was a warm July evening in twenty fourteen a port camera captured Marcelek striding to warwards a mega yacht, where he's greeted by Natalia before they climb on board to join a group of men.

We know all this thanks to an article from a consortium of journalists that was published in Germany's Deshpiegel and other outlets in twenty twenty four, and although there are differing interpretations of what exactly happened, the setting and who was there are known thanks to that camera footage and from people who attended at this party.

Natalia introduces Marcelek to a man named Staz Staz Pittlinsky, a Russian military man who has connections to the gru Russian military intelligence and the agency we understood Marcelect be working with in Libya.

And what some reporters say happened is this on the yacht, Stas recruitian to work for Russian intelligence.

They quote a source who witnessed the early days of Marcelec's friendship with Staz.

They say, you can see Marcelek from two perspectives, Marcelect before Stas and Marcelek after Stas.

This possible moment of Marcelec's recruitment is fascinating to me, partly because it's a story we've all heard a version of before.

It's that old tale of doing a deal with dark forces, the Faust legend, a fable that's been told over and over again in different forms.

That's one reason why recruitment has this mythology around it.

But actually it's a little unhelpful to consider it as just a handshake with the devil, because recruitment almost never happens in a single moment.

It's a process.

I needed to speak to someone who could tell me more about how that works and understand the significance of this moment in Nice because we know already that Marcelek did say yes.

What we still don't know is why Hi Boris Hiatleo Sam.

This is Boris Boris Voladavski today.

He's a historian specializing in Cold War spying and a filmmaker.

Everything went well with the filming.

Absolutely absolutely, We're finishing, but still working at day and night.

He's seventy and has a mildly exaggerated anglophile pose to his dress, low ties and waistcoats and umbrellas and so on.

Boris's film is a semi dramatized documentary.

It's called Spy Capital two and it's all about Jan Marcelek.

So like me, Boris has been spending a lot of time trying to get into Marcelek's head.

But I'm not actually interested in speaking to Boris just because of this film.

I'm interested because Boris is himself a former Russian intelligence officer.

It's very simple concerning my rather short participation with Russian special forces, which I was an office of spetsnaz what is called normally into worst sleeper agents.

So if anyone is going to be able to credibly interpret mas Lex recruitment, perhaps it's Boris.

In the nineteen eighties, Boris was fresh out of university with a bevy of European languages under his belt.

That's when he was drawn into an elite cadret of three hundred Russian special agents whose mission was to infiltrate European states and wait for an expected war between the USSR and the West.

Do you know where they would have sent you?

Was it Germany or Austria?

Did they disclose that?

Oh?

Yes, I know, definitely.

The first destination should have been Germany, and we studied Germany in every detail, and from Germany, after a couple of years in Germany, it was to be a transfer to England.

Boris spent six years training for this mission, turned into a lethal secret machine.

There were very interested in linguistic exercises, psychological linguistics, practical linguistics, phonetics and other things.

And toward the diving, mountaineering, parachuting, martial arts or all those sorts of things.

We were to handle, all sorts of handguns, submachine guns, pistols, all those sorts of things.

That was interesting.

This is a bit of a funny question, but did you believe in what you were being trained to do?

What was your sense of loyalty?

Like?

Was it too Russia?

Did you believe in the purpose of what was going on?

It was much less a kind of ideology or propaganda, but more of fun and interest in what you were going through and how you were trained.

Boris didn't recruit new agents, but he did know a lot about how the GIU worked.

So I asked Boris, how would the GIU you go about recruiting someone like Jan Masselek.

There's a long check, there's a so called development of the target in order to know him better, to know whether he is inclined in this or that way, to collaborate with foreign intelligence service, whether he is inclined to provide information that is needed from him.

And if Moscow decides, and it is always Moscow who decides.

If Moscow decided that this person can be and should be recruited, then they work out ways of how to recruit this person.

So initially you'd have someone that would identify a potential target, and then you'd have a period of development where you would watch them, maybe test them a little bit, sort of introduce figures into their life, see how they respond, see if they're suitable as an agent to recruit.

That's correct, Yes, and even in the so called easy cases that might go one for three months, six months, for a year, or even longer.

Right, And what kind of things would a GIU officer be looking for, I mean psychologically, what kind of person or profile might they see as somebody that's vulnerable to recruitment.

A person that should be judged vulnerable for recruitment is somebody who has something negative like here is very much interested in money, in women and getting promotion, in getting business.

Somebody who is interested in something.

And of course that kind of weakness isn't only found in greedy businessmen.

If we are talking about recruiting a journalist, for example, it would be somebody who would get access, suddenly, get access to information sensitive inside information, would be admitted, for example, to some Kremlin Kremlins briefings, or get access to some persons within the Kremlins, and imustration from my chair something.

Now.

I can't be certain, but I'm pretty sure that when I used to cover defense for the Ft, this kind of thing happened to me.

A couple of times I got offered access that seemed too good to be true, though not with the Russians.

And to be clear, I wasn't recruited, and maybe I was just being hypervigilant, but even at the time, I remember thinking something felt slightly off.

And it reminds me a little bit too of Marcelek giving Paul the k Novechok document.

One way I see that is as an enticement, a suggestion that if Paul played ball, there might be more juicy information to come.

When I think about marceleg and Nice, I can tick off a lot of the factors that Boris mentions.

By twenty fourteen, he'd been traveling to Russia for years, so he was almost certainly on the radar of Russian intelligence.

He was evidently interested in money.

His whole lifestyle was fueled by it.

He had a weakness for attractive women, and of course he had another big weakness too, he was a fraudster.

So one way you could interpret that day is like this.

Here was Jan Marcelek, by this point already secretly breaking the law, partying on a yacht with a Russian fem fetale who wasn't his long term girlfriend.

A perfect set of opportunities for blackmail.

And yet Boris believes that there's much more to it.

Boris says he has directly spoken with Stas Polinski, the supposed GRU agent who was on the yacht.

We haven't been able to get in contact with him ourselves, Boris says.

Staz is in Moscow and keeping a low profile.

He says Staz probably spoke to him so freely because they're both Russians and both from an intelligence world.

And Stas told him he didn't recruit Marcelek.

He had never recruited Marsalk as presented in this in the media in most of the newspapers, because this was not his job.

So, just to be clear, Boris, you had a long conversation with Stas by phone at you reached him in Moscow, and based on that, you're very clear that he is not a person who could have performed that function of being a recruiter.

Absolutely in our way, Absolutely in our way, a recruiter is a very specific job, and if we were talking about somebody or would be sent to recruit a person like Marsalk that would be a specially trained recruiter.

But that definitely not happen, So we are absolutely sure that Petinski did not recruit Marsalic.

I have some questions about Boris's conversation with Stas.

I think any intelligence officer would deny recruiting an asset, and I wonder if Boris's view of recruitment is perhaps a bit outdated based on his own experience from his time in the GIU in the nineteen eighties, because, as I understand Russia's modern intelligence agencies, their activities can be much less formalized, much less constrained in who they engage with to work for them.

I'm also thinking Boris is a trained undercover intelligence officer formerly of the same service Marcelek is alleged to work for to play Devil's advocate.

I suppose people might say, well, you know, Boris, you're former GIU officer.

Maybe you're just saying that too, because that's what the Kremlin wants you to say to minimize this scandal.

What's your response to that.

I am response to that that I have not been a JIU office in the past thirty years the country.

I am an intelligence historian who is writing books that are very very much unliked in Russia.

I am doing investigations.

I'm identifying Russian agents.

I am identifying in my books how Russian intelligence services work.

I show their weak parts, I show their strong parts.

I explain how the structure operates.

I am giving plenty of interviews, writing plenty of articles myself, doing films that, of course are very much negatively viewed at by Moscow by the Kremlin.

So no way that I have been corroborating with them since I left the country voluntarily more than thirty years ago.

That's fair, I think, although it does strike me that his answer sounds like it could be a little bit rehearsed, but then he's probably been asked this question before.

Setting these downs aside, I'm still intrigued by the thrust of what Boris is telling me.

To be clear, Boris isn't saying Marcelec didn't work for the Russians.

He's just saying it's more complicated than that.

Boris's interpretation is that Marcelek is not an agent, but what he describes as a collaborator, a kind of top tier freelancer.

He thought that he could set up his own private.

Business intelligence organization to do jobs that he thought would be interesting for him and for the Russians, because he was quite obviously pitching this that kind of operation to the Russians, and the Russian said, yes, we might be interested.

On oh, this is not interested for us at the moment.

I think there's something in this idea.

I don't get the impression that Marcelek is just someone taking orders from the Russians.

I think he has his own agency in all of this.

There are tantalizing digital traces of Stas and Yan's friendship over the years.

One I've got in my mind in particular sticks out.

It's a picture from a birthday party Stas's.

I think he's got a cake in front of him, a huge grin on his face, empty wineglasses dot the table, and Yanis sat right next to him, leaning towards him.

There's an intimacy to it.

This doesn't seem like the kind of relationship you'd have with someone who has blackmailed you or coerced you in some other way.

So I asked Boris.

If Marcelek is a freelancer, why might he have wanted to work with stas with Russia.

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

And if he were offered an offer whether to offer his services to the British intelligence or to the Russian intelligence, he psychologically, politically and ideologically would probably choose Russia rather than Britain.

Why do you think that is he was a free, truly free man in Russia, or at least that's what he thought he was, or he is in Russia while he was there.

It's not freedom as we understand it.

They're thinking that living in Moscow, in Moscow specifically, not in Russian.

In Moscow, they live in an absolutely free society.

They do what they want.

It's a sort of freedom of privilege.

It's a freedom to break a few rules and not be put in jailtely.

Absolutely correct, absolutely correct, and specifically, when you collaborate with intelligence services, you understand that you belong to the elite of the society, can do you want and nobody can do anything against you.

Mulling over what Boris has said, the zill lanes in Moscow come to mind.

They are segregated lanes in Moscow's big arterial roads, reserved for the use of the nomenclatura, the most important people in the ruling administration.

They're a symbol of what being in the intelligence and government elite in Russia means a different set of rules.

Russia is still a kind of feudal society where power doesn't flow evenly.

It coalesces around people, not institutions or laws.

And I think that's the point to grasp.

Marcelet could always operated by different rules his own, where he could rules that don't constrain his image of self, his freedom and ambission.

All of this reminds me of what I heard from Marcelec's old classmates in Kloster Neuberg.

Sat in school in the library, in front of that computer whenever he could be there, excusing himself from lessons others had to sit through, maybe because he was already more capable.

There's a big gap between leaving home in nineteen ninety eight and fleeing to Moscow in twenty twenty years a fugitive though twenty two years, and a big psychological jump, because many of us have become more afraid of Russia in this period, convinced of its malign intentions, unsettled by its persecution of dissidence at home, its throttling of democracy, and its hatred of liberal values like sexual tolerance, and its actual warmongering.

For a long time, I struggled to understand how Marcelect could have been drawn to all of that.

That is, until someone got in touch, someone who opened up a whole new perspective on where Marcelect's affinity for Russia might have come from.

I was struck because there was one dimension missing here.

That's coming up after the break.

After the Ft first outed Marcelek as a Russian asset, I got an interesting email from an Austrian historian, Thomas Riegler.

Thomas wrote to say he'd found an element of the Marterlek story that no one else had noticed.

So far.

Everybody was like reporting, okay, Jan Marshalik is so fond of James bond Jan Marshalik likes military stuff and everything, and he really enjoys being an operative in this secret struggle.

Where does it come from?

And here I think his personal history comes into play.

Thomas's passion is spending time in the archives researching spying, a subject close to him because it dominates the history of the city and the country he lives in.

There was always this topic of Vienna being a spy capital, but nobody actually could say what that meant.

Yeah, and so my research was always to get to the bottom of this.

Why is actually Vienna being referred to as a spire capital.

In Austria, spying is basically legal as long as you're not doing it against the Austrian state itself.

Since it's independence, Austria has considered itself a neutual country.

A huge debate still rages about what that actually means, but one thing it's led to is Austria applying an extremely light touch when policing the activities of other powers on its own soil.

It's exactly for that reason that there are so many spies in Vienna, because it's the safest city in Europe for them to operate in, and there are a lot, particularly Russian ones.

That's also partly because of where it is.

Vienna is in the very center of Europe.

Atlantic countries, the core of that idea we call the West, sometimes have a bit of a mental block in grasping this.

Austria tends to intuitively get labeled as a kind of mini Germany, but Vienna, the city that invented the Croissant, is closer to Ukraine than it is to France.

During the Cold War, politically Austria might have been relegated to the minor league, but under the surface, Vienna actually became a new center of the great hidden geopolitical games of the time, and for Russia in particular, it was a crucial window into the West.

It's the kind of a launching pet for operations beyond the Iron Curtain.

This is like a logistical hub away can move people between those blocks.

It's the Vienna of Graham Green's the Third Man, a city of divided loyalties, and this is the world that Jan's gran father operated in.

Two His grandfather, Hans Marshalek, is a very prominent figure in Austria because he survived a term and concentration camp at Matthausen.

He was in the resistance against the Nazi regime and he was kind of the first ones actually who put together a remembrance culture in Austria.

In his youth, Hans Marcelek was a Communist.

That's not exactly unusual in this era.

Joining the communists who was one of the most effective ways you could stand up to Nazism.

After the Second World War ended, he helped to establish the Malthausen Memorial Museum and he took on a senior position in the Vienna State Police.

He was soon involved with counterintelligence on behalf of the Austrian state.

But when Thomas started digging into Yan's grandfather's his in the Austrian State archives, he found something else.

I came across the line in a book where the author stated that one of the key subordinates of the first Vienna State Police chief was this Hans Marshalick.

And then I thought, okay, I might try my luck and get to the archives and ask if there's a dossier on Hans Marshalik.

And I from my personal experience, I was very low keen expectations.

And then when I got the material.

To my great surprise, I must say, there was this document laying out the case against Hans Marshalick.

Thomas still has the records and he's brought them out to show me and it's a yeah, it's one two three pages And is that like a by lagger an extra?

Yeah, it's five pages, three page letter and then a sort of a little appendix of the detail this document, it's a declassified political police file from nineteen fifty six, basically laying out the dringende Vadakh, the urgent suspicion that Marcelek has betrayed his duties in the police and to the State of Austria and has informed or given information to the Russians.

It shows that Hans Marsilek was suspected of giving information about four people members of German counterintelligence and a CIA informer to the Soviets, and those people were subsequently abducted and sent to a gulag.

Thomas had found that Hans Marcelek, Yan's grandfather was under suspicion of being a Russian spy.

Yan's grandfather died in twenty eleven when Yan was thirty one.

Thomas believed that Hans must have loomed Lofe in Yan's life.

Of course, this rich personal history, this man must have had an influence on Jan Marshalik, especially when it comes to his fascination with the secret world.

We can't know, but for me it's a powerful idea that this man, who we can reasonably say was someone of great charisma, a leader, and a figurehead, might have exerted some kind of pull on Yan.

Yan was, after all, largely alienated from his parents, his father who had left him as a kid, and his mother who he was estranged from.

I'm only really just digesting all of this when Thomas tells me something else.

He also has information about Staz Petlinsky, the Russian associated with the Giu, the guy on the yacht.

His own grandfather was a KHB officer stationed in Guienna.

Vidon'te xext proof of that, but it looks like it is the case.

Yeah, the grandfather of this Russian operative was stationed in Vienna, and that he most likely met with Hans Marshalik, and that he caltivated Tim as a sauce.

Thomas is saying that not only was Yan Marsceleck's grandfather, Hans likely a Russian spy, but that also Staz's grandfather was a Soviet intelligence officer based in Vienna too, and Thomas feels that he would have very likely come into contact with Yan's grandfather and may even have recruited him.

This is based on his knowledge of how Russia's intelligence agencies were operating in Vienna at this time, which is that's just a remarkable historical coincidence, isn't it?

Or is it more than a coincidence that these kind of things only happen because they're almost they were meant to happen.

Yeah, it looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story because this ties together the Cold War as the new one.

And maybe that's just a speculation.

There was some sort of inuitiation going on here, like an introduction was made.

I mean, is that that's not too fanciful.

It's not unsinkable.

I mean, it's at this point it's just pure speculation.

But you have to remember that the way Russian intelligence works, the trust is built upon such introductions.

It's hard to weigh the significance of all this because ultimately I can't tell you what Jan Marselek did or didn't know about his grandfather's past, nor what the Russians knew about it.

But I do know that Russia's intelligence services have long institutional memories.

They pay very close attention to their own archives all Russian intelligence offices.

They spend years learning about past successes and failures as part of their either way.

As Thomas shared all this with me, I realized I had been thinking of grandson Yan and grandfather Hans as inhabiting radically different worlds.

After all, Hands lived through the Cold War, whereas Yan, I'd thought of him as someone largely motivated by money and glamour in a post ideological age.

But I'm starting to see another side of things, and Thomas does too.

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

And this is a dangerous situation because those spies tend to be the better ones, better than the guys who do it solely for money.

How would you describe this new ideological fault line?

What is it?

I would say, of course Russia is not the Soviet Union, but it's mostly like a pans leavistic, imperialistic outlook.

But it's also very much set against liberalism against the West in general terms, and people are choosing their sides in this struggle.

Maybe ideology is a bit of a misnomer.

I think the German word veltan schaog is kind of better here.

It means worldview, the subtle difference being that veltan schawang is not so much about political theory as it is about behavior.

This anti liberal order that Putin stands for and that Russia in some way represents.

It's easy to write that off as evil, but that's not necessarily where it comes from.

It's really about the fact that Putin and others believe the post war legal ordering of the world is a failure, that liberalism is just a costume worn by the West to make us feel good about ourselves, and that the best way to stand up for national interests and ultimately for a more peaceful world is strength authoritarianism.

It's a worldview partly conditioned by Soviet thinking, too, that war and peace don't really exist.

Everything instead is just constant struggle, And maybe on an individual level.

For Marsilek, it sort of fits with this idea that laws rules, corporate accounting practices, they're there to be broken if needed.

This kind of worldview, it's not really an ideology someone can learn in a book or from a political speech.

Something you feel pick up over time.

It's something that inspires you to act.

Coming up next time on Hot Money, he.

Knew that the information based on the anonymous letters was never enough for the judiciary to take measures.

What has changed meantime suddenly that was the cause.

Actually now this sort of shows that they both have a common employer, which is jan Master.

They were all plotting together exactly from.

The perspective of puttin what would be great to have in Europe a country as a door to infiltrate whole Europe and there install your people.

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

It was written and reported by me Sam Jones.

The senior producer and co writer is Peggy Sutton.

Our producer is Izzy Carter.

Our researcher is Marine Saint.

Our show is edited by Karen shakerge fact checking by Kira Levigne, sound design and mastering by Jake Gorsky and Marcelo de' olivia, with additional sound design by Izzy Carter.

Original music from Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphonet.

Our show art is by Sean Carney.

Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley, Amy Gains McQuaid and Matthew Garahan.

Additional editing by Paul Murphy.

Special thanks to Ruler Calaffe, Dan McCrumb, Laura Clark, Alistair Mackey, Manuela Saragosa, Nigel Hanson, Vicki Merrick, Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Jake Flanagan, Jacob Goldstein, Sarah Nix, and Greta Cohne.

I'm Sam Jones.

I want to take a moment to thank you for being a pushkin Plus subscriber.

I hope you are enjoying hot money.

Be sure to take advantage of all pushkin Plus has to offer, including add free access to all pushkin shows, bonus episodes, early access, exclusive binges, and full audio books.

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