A murderous plan:Putin's hunt after Viennese politicians, police officers and reporters

Pursued by Putin’s Hunters in Vienna

What an honour: An award at the FPA Media Awards for Falter. Our cover story about the activities of Russian spies and their Austrian accomplices, written by Florian Klenk and Tessa Szsyzskowitz, won in the “Print & Web Story of the Year” category. Read the full article here.

Investigation files reveal the biggest espionage affair of the Second Republic: On behalf of the Kremlin, Putin's henchmen in Austria pursued not only the Viennese ÖVP party chairman, but also the editor of profil, the head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and an investigative reporter. One officer even revealed the personal data of more than 36,000 police officers to a suspected Russian spy

• Florian Klenk

 

• Tessa Szyszkowitz

Vienna, Rennweg

Perhaps here: In a massive barracks on Vienna's Rennweg, in a high-security wing, well guarded and undisturbed by listening devices, sits the Austrian Office for the Protection of the Constitution: the Directorate of State Protection and Intelligence Service (DSN). In a sober meeting room, Omar Haijawi-Pirchner has taken a seat for a background discussion. He is the country's top intelligence officer, the director of the DSN. He will get rid of something fundamental that allows only one conclusion: the Republic of Austria is threatened. Quite massively. And he, Haijawi-Pirchner, was also targeted by the Russians.

Haijawi-Pirchner takes his time, clarifies, he wants to provide the public with a "bigger picture" about the current situation. It is no longer a suspicion, but a certainty: The Russian ruler Vladimir Putin is involved in Vienna, he sends his spies and murder squads. He presumably bought civil servants through intermediaries.

Haijawi-Pirchner and some of his officials were observed by Putin's henchmen "because they wanted to steal our data carriers," he says. A group of agents, originating from Bulgaria and recruited and paid by the Russian secret service, has just been convicted in London of espionage and a murder plot. Her immediate client was the fugitive alleged Wirecard billionaire fraudster Jan Marsalek, an Austrian who works as a secret service agent in Russia.

Austria's top intelligence officer Haijawi-Pirchner, deployed in 2021 to modernize the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which was attacked after a scandalous raid under FPÖ Interior Minister Herber Kickl, not only investigates Islamists, right-wing and left-wing extremists, he and his team also fend off espionage from Russia and attacks by Russia's agents on the republic or the lives of citizens living here.

The top policeman himself became the target of a Bulgarian cell directed from Russia, which spied in Vienna, was supported by allegedly corrupt Viennese officials and – at least that's what you read in relevant chats of the agents – was apparently on the verge of carrying out a murder on behalf of Vladimir Putin.

People wanted Haijawi-Pirchner's cell phone, just as they had already stolen the data of the iPhone of the head of cabinet in the Ministry of the Interior and brought it to Russia. "But they didn't get close enough to me," he says. His private paths and whereabouts had been scouted. But the agents weren't good enough.

In Austria, tens of thousands of pages of investigation files, chat logs and court documents that a Falter research team  was able to view show, Russian spies are shadowing or shadowing representatives of the state, politics and the media. They can also rely on FPÖ politicians who work for them – with bad intentions, out of offended vanity or out of naivety. They are people who worked in the cabinet of party leader Herbert Kickl, so they are very close to the almost People's Chancellor, and were even taken into the closest confidence by him.

And so the case perhaps also shows why a coalition with Kickl was so energetically rejected by ex-chancellor (and ex-interior minister) Karl Nehammer that he handed in his resignation instead of letting the Freedom Party and its Putin trivializers back into power.

Kickl's loyalists, such as former MP Hans-Jörg Jenewein, illegally had sensitive data sent to them from the minister's office during his 2018-2019 term of office, and they hoarded USB sticks with highly explosive data sets at home, such as an electronic directory with the names, addresses and personal data of 36,000 police officers, which had been leaked by an official from the interior ministry. For what? The security authorities in Austria suspect that this directory could also have ended up in Russia. Like the cell phone of Michael Kloibmüller, the former head of cabinet of the Ministry of the Interior.

Not only top police officers like Haijawi-Pirchner are in the Russians' sights, but also top politicians and declared opponents of Putin. Men like Karl Mahrer.

Vienna, Lichtenfelsgasse

Here is the second stop in this complex story. Behind the parliament building in Vienna at Lichtenfelsgasse 7 is the barely secured headquarters of the Austrian People's Party. Karl Mahrer receives the Falter in his bright office, he is the former state police commander of Vienna, today the top candidate of the People's Party for the federal capital. This is also the first time he has spoken about this Russian espionage operation against him.

It is February 13 when we meet him for this research. A hectic day. The coalition talks between the People's Party and the FPÖ have just collapsed. Mahrer serves Red Bull sugar-free and chocolates. "Kickl and his party are a security risk," he will say to the cameras at a press conference afterwards. The Viennese ÖVP leader knows what he is talking about. He was also under surveillance.

The Bulgarian gang convicted in London, which spied on Omar Haijawi-Pirchner on behalf of Russia, was also after him. His data was also to be siphoned off. Why his of all things? "Because I was a member of the National Security Council, because I sat on secret parliamentary committees, because as chairman of the Committee on Internal Affairs I had access to highly sensitive and classified documents," Mahrer suspects.

Vienna, Hainburger Straße

Anna Thalhammer also had access to sensitive data. She is standing at the third location in this crime thriller, at Hainburger Straße 48. We meet the editor-in-chief of Profil for a local inspection in front of the editorial office of the daily newspaper Die Presse, where she spent many years researching Russian agents as an investigative reporter.

Opposite the editorial office is the noble fish restaurant Lubin, an occasional meeting place for press people when they conduct interviews. For weeks, the Bulgarian woman Tsevanka D., 49, who lives in Vienna, lurked there. Her job: the observation of Thalhammer.

Shortly before Christmas 2024, Anna Thalhammer published parts of the investigation file, which documents the extent of the espionage operation. As a victim, she has access to the files. The Bulgarian gang had rented apartments in Vienna, broken into apartments and stolen laptops, which then ended up with the FSB in Russia. And it has sent a USB stick stolen by BVT officials to Russia with the mobile phone data of the head of cabinet Michael Kloibmüller – on it also a lot of highly private information that can serve as kompromat, i.e. blackmail material.

One has the impression that Thalhammer has not yet decided for herself whether the spying on her person is just a small farce in this state affair – or an unprecedented attack on the freedom of the press. She cannot, she says cautiously, scandalize her own case. In  any case, the current editor of Profil was a target of Putin agents for weeks, that is on record. In 2018, she was the first journalist to uncover the networks of the "mole" Egisto Ott, the now nationally known top official who is said to have sold top-secret information from the police computer to Russian agents around his buddy, the former BVT department head Martin Weiss. Thalhammer was also one of the first to uncover the links between Marsalek, Ott and Weiss. She was ridiculed, not taken seriously.

Now she tells what the secret service discreetly revealed to her in a "sensitization talk" last year. Russian henchmen had also monitored them. Their home is now protected with video cameras and increased security equipment. No, Thalhammer is not afraid. Or should she?

The investigative reporter is not the only one who was spied on by the unemployed Bulgarian Tsevanka D. in Vienna. The Bulgarian investigative journalist Christo Grozev, who temporarily resides in Vienna, lives under real danger of death and under police protection. He worked for the research platforms Bellingcat and The Insider and is probably the most important investigative reporter in the world. Putin, as Wirecard CEO and Putin spy Jan Marsalek explicitly writes in a chat to one of his Bulgarian agents, "hates him". And if Putin hates someone, it can mean his death sentence.

No wonder. Grozev not only revealed that the Russian secret service FSB was behind the poison plot against the now murdered Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, but he also convicted Putin of other attacks. The Skripal assassination attempt in London in 2018, the Tiergarten murder in Berlin in 2019, the shooting down of a Malaysia Airlines plane in Ukraine in 2014: Grozev has always provided important research on this.

That's why Marsalek and his Bulgarian team operating in Vienna not only wanted to observe him, but also murder him. With a "sledgehammer" in the style of the "Wagner Group" (the trademark of the Putin mercenary group was to execute enemies by smashing the skull), as Marsalek fantasizes in a chat, or by means of an ice axe, a poison attack or with the help of an IS suicide bomber.

The agents not only rented an Airbnb apartment in Vienna with a view of Grozev's apartment for observation, they also filmed his front gate with an iPhone camera. "The focus of the operational measures of the intelligence cell against Christo Grozev was on his localization and observation, but with a completely different objective than would be usual for Western countries," writes the special commission "Fama" of the Federal Criminal Police Office, which is investigating the Russian cell: "The aim of these spying and observation measures was [...] to kidnap Christo Grozev and abduct or kill him to Moscow."

It is not only the fact that the agent Tsevanka D., who is active in Vienna – unlike her accomplices arrested in London – is free in Vienna that makes the case in Austria so disturbing. But also the fact that Jan Marsalek was able to access some top Austrian officials, who in turn harnessed politicians and police officers for themselves.

One of them is Martin Weiss, a gaunt and conservative-looking lawyer and detective who was responsible for counterintelligence and counterterrorism until 2016 and then officially took a leave of absence due to "burnout". Weiss, however, did not relax, but signed on as Marsalek's security adviser and moved to Munich. Marsalek was already closely linked to the Russian secret service at the time and Weiss was his information supplier.

In a report in 2022, the police stated that Weiss and Ott had already formed an "intelligence network in cooperation with Jan Marsalek" and attacked the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counter-Terrorism "in order to weaken it, to damage its international reputation".

When Marsalek was exposed as a suspected billionaire fraudster in 2020 in the wake of the Wirecard bankruptcy, Weiss organized a private plane, a Cessna, for him with a former FPÖ politician at Vöslau airfield and "evacuated" him to Belarus, including a reception committee. Marsalek traveled under the name "Maks Mauer" with an Austrian passport forged by Russians - the number of which, curiously, was stolen from a children's passport, as the investigators found out. In Russia, the FSB gave him the identity of a priest.

Together with Egisto Ott, his equally frustrated buddy from past days in the criminal investigation department, Weiss then organized information for Marsalek about the Putin whistleblower Grozev. This is shown by chats between the two. On December 15, 2020 – just one day after Grozev published the Navalny investigation – Weiss asked his former subordinate Ott to "find out everything about this guy Grozev".

Ott got on his socks to get the journalist's registration address. In order not to leave any digital traces, he walked to the registration office in Spittal an der Drau, identified himself there with an official cockade and, under false pretenses, obtained an excerpt from the population register, which ended up in the hands of agents via Weiss and Marsalek, who broke into Grozev's home and stole his data carriers.

This was particularly brazen since Ott had already been in custody in 2021 for espionage for the Russians, but was then released due to a lack of "risk of committing a crime". Even after the spying against Grozev, the Higher Regional Court released him again. There was no risk of committing the crime and fleeing, according to the judges' senate.

Of all people, a man who not only hoarded masses of information on his computer about Russian dissidents and renegade Putin critics whom he had spied on.

In a "fault analysis", Ott had even thought about how the murder commissioned by Putin in Berlin's Tiergarten could have been implemented more perfectly. The perpetrator and Putin intimate, who was caught and extradited to Russia last year as part of a "hostage exchange", should next time travel to the scene of the crime by Flixbus and not by Deutsche Bahn, Ott recommended. There are fewer controls.

How dangerous was all this? To do this, you have to travel to a fourth location, London.

London, Old Bailey

Part of the Bulgarian troupe that was able to spy on Anna Thalhammer, Omar Haijawi-Pirchner, Karl Mahrer and Christo Grozev in Vienna for two years on behalf of Jan Marsalek was on trial there.

Vanya Gaberova, 30, Katrin Ivanova, 33, and Tihomir Ivanchev, 39, were tried at the Old Bailey, London's Central Criminal Court. In the Crown Court, which opened in 1907 not far from St. Paul's Cathedral, the most important criminal cases in the United Kingdom are heard. Court No. 7 on the second floor is a rather small hall that has been the scene of a spy thriller since December 2. And a soap opera.

It is a cold day in January when the Bulgarians are once again being tried. White horsehair wigs sit on the heads of the seven lawyers present here. Judge, prosecutor, defense lawyers. They signal: This is where the British state is speaking.

The prosecutor Alison Morgan leaves no doubt that lies and deception and espionage are being cleared up here. "When you realized that Grozev was a famous journalist," she says during cross-examination with Vanya Gaberova, who was used as a decoy, "didn't you find it strange that you were asked to spy on him?" The accused answers: "No, I thought he had done something wrong because he was wanted by Interpol. I thought Biser was working for Interpol."

Biser, that's Biser Dzhambazov. After his spectacular arrest in February 2023 in the UK, he confessed to spying for the Russian domestic intelligence service FSB. On behalf of Orlin Roussev, who was also arrested by the British police and confessed.

The three in the dock – Gaberova, Ivanova and Ivanchev – were only auxiliary spies. And they claim in their trial that they did not know that they were spying for the FSB. The mastermind of this Bulgarian spy ring is Austrian and free. Or what's left of it in Moscow: Jan Marsalek.

The three defendants claim never to have met the notorious Austrian. The contact always went through Biser Dzhambazov. The other Bulgarian spies call them "Minions" after the amiable, yellow single-celled organisms from children's films such as "Despicable Me" because they had been hired for the lowest services.

The prosecutor, it is clearly recognizable, does not think the three are cute, she does not believe a word of the defendants. The three defendants sit in a glass box on the back wall of the small hall. Opposite them is the judge in the red gown. To his right are the twelve jurors. To the left and right of the side entrance, there are a few chairs for the press in addition to the boxes for the interpreters. Here you can find out live how a political murder is planned.

Gaberova's first trip to Vienna as a spy took place from August 24 to 31, 2021. Biser Dzhambazov was waiting for them at the airport and led them to the street where Christo Grozev lived with his family. They went to the restaurant where he liked to eat. "But he wasn't there," Gaberova whispered in the courtroom in London three and a half years later. "So we went for a walk, and Biser told me that Grozev was an evil journalist who made good people look bad."

After that, they moved into an apartment rented on Airbnb opposite that of Grozev and his family. Later, they were to install a video camera there. "What was your role in all this?" she is asked in the courtroom. "Biser Dzhambazov didn't ask anything of me," says Vanya Gaberova, she was only there.

The chat messages between the senior officers, however, speak a completely different language. On the floor of courtroom no. 7 are thick plastic folders containing the Telegram chats that the spy ring sent itself under the guidance of Jan Marsalek. Or rather, "Rupert Ticz", as he called himself. Biser Dzhambazov appears as "Van Damme" and Orlin Roussev as "Jackie Chan". The folders are there for viewing, photography is not allowed in the courtroom. But they did take notes.

On August 23, 2021 – while Biser Dzhambazov and Vanya Gaberova were looking around Vienna – Roussev wrote to Marsalek: "We will transmit photos of Grozev's apartment." There is no doubt about Gaberova's function, at least on the part of her recruiters: "A brunette girl who owns a beauty salon in London sent Grozev a friend request on Facebook," Roussev writes to Jan Marsalek: "He accepted it right away." Smiley.

Later, Marsalek will discuss with Roussev how they could take Grozev out of circulation. Abduction to Moscow or to Syria perhaps? Poisoning or beating to death – also a possibility. Roussev shows himself to be historically competent and mentions Stalin opponent Leon Trotsky, who was murdered with an ice axe in exile in Mexico in 1940. Or the Ukrainian leader Stepan Bandera, whom the KGB poisoned with hydrogen cyanide long after the war. Marsalek responds on the Telegram chat: Better than an ice axe is a sledgehammer – just like the Wagner mercenaries kill traitors and defectors.

In the courtroom in London, the "Minions" claim to have known nothing about it. High politics, the Bulgarian sub-spies asserted in the courtroom, had completely passed them by. They wouldn't even have googled Christo Grozev. Although they filmed him on the plane on the way to Valencia for a conference. Or photographed him at breakfast in the hotel, where they moved into a room next to Grozev.

How serious the conversation between the spies was remains unclear. The case of Alexei Navalny has proven how Russia's secret service takes Putin critics out of circulation. The Russian oppositionist was poisoned in August 2021, barely survived and died in a Russian penal camp at the end of February 2024 after months of torture. For the court, however, it is clear that the agent activity was punishable. The defendants are convicted, the sentence is not to be announced until May. The possible maximum sentence: 14 years in prison.

Although the three "Minions" were not the really big fish, the British judiciary initiated a lawsuit that lasted more than three months to get to the bottom of their activities. The twelve jurors, who had heard every detail of the evidence for many weeks, needed 32 hours to reach their verdict.

In Austria, on the other hand, another Bulgarian spy from the ring of Marsalek is still at large. Last summer, she was arrested in her small apartment in Vienna with a task force and released a short time later. Her name: Tsevanka D., 49. Apparently, the judge believes her assurances that she is only a small cog. She had to take care of her sick mother, she whined at the police. She will dutifully stay away from evil agents.

Profile editor Thalhammer pulls out her mobile phone and shows the Instagram account Tsevanka D.s. We see a blonde, lonely-looking woman hiking in the mountains, petting her cat and pouting into the camera.

D. confessed to the DSN about her spying activities, but asserted that the whole thing was only a harmless "student project". A few Bulgarian friends, D. testifies, "wanted me to photograph the building where Anna works, which I did. I took a photo of the entrance to the publishing house building [...]. I was also told to sit down in the fish restaurant Lubin, where [...] Anna goes out to eat."

The police do not believe her naivety. Tsevanka D.'s observations are meticulously recorded in her notebook. On July 21, 2022, from 12 noon to 2 p.m., D. waited for Thalhammer to "come out of the publishing house and go to the restaurant for lunch". Five days later, she observed Thalhammer again from "8:30 a.m. to 9:00 a.m."

She was "walking up and down the street in front of the publishing house, waiting to see if Anna might come to work." On August 2, 2022, at around 12 noon, "I went back to the Lubin fish restaurant opposite the Presse publishing house and waited outside the restaurant to see if Anna would go there for lunch this time."

Something else made the police suspicious: The agent keeps visiting a room at the main station, apparently to deposit information for her clients in a "dead mailbox". No, no, she answered, it had not been a secret meeting place. She only has an "alcohol problem" and would "sometimes buy a small bottle of wine on the way home, go into this room and drink the bottle there secretly."

Despite these statements, the suspect was not taken into custody by the Austrian investigators because of the risk of concealment. She continues to walk around freely in Vienna. An article by Thalhammer about it fizzles out shortly before Christmas in the Christmas stress and the coalition negotiations that are about to fail.

Jan Marsalek apparently controlled Bulgarian spy rings. He also controlled the secret service Weiss and Ott, who were still in office at the time. Previously unpublished files show how deep the two were able to dig in the Ministry of the Interior. Civil servants in the most sensitive positions – such as in the cabinet of Interior Minister Herbert Kickl or in the service committee – worked for the two. And how. And that leads to the fifth location in this crime novel, the Ministry of the Interior at Herrengasse 7.

Vienna, Herrengasse

In hundreds of chats, you can read how Ott and Weiss used an old friend to get information from 2017 onwards. It is an office director of the Ministry of the Interior, Ott calls her "one of us" in a chat message.

The civil servant sat as a conservative staff representative on the service committee of the Ministry of the Interior and then worked in the department for digital security, of all things. As a member of a disciplinary senate, she was also responsible for corrupt police officers. The police, however, consider them corrupt themselves. But the judiciary let her go.

It is September 11, 2021, when the office director is pushed by plainclothes investigators from the Danube bank highway near Stockerau to a highway parking lot. For several hours, the criminalists have secretly pursued the colleague, shadowed her while shopping for a relative in need of care in a metro market and then waved her aside. She has to leave her private car behind, get into the investigators' vehicle and accompany them to her home, to a small apartment. There, data carriers are confiscated that do not cast a good light on the officer.

She is suspected of having betrayed official secrets, the investigators tell the office director. The Federal Criminal Police Office explicitly describes the officer as a "relevant source of information for Egisto Ott", and it himself describes her in a chat as an "informant from the BMI". She has also been "friends with Martin Weiss for 35 years," as she tells in a subsequent police interrogation. She even transferred money to him, 20,000 euros.

The office director is ready for "acts of support" for Weiss, the police write, for example, she is privy to the rental of a "cheap apartment" for Weiss and is informed that he is under telephone surveillance.

The investigators make the most serious accusations against their colleague. For months, she had provided confidential information from the Ministry of the Interior in chats with Egisto Ott under the alias "Elli Connor". For example, the "digital personnel directory" (PVZ) with the data records of 36,368 civil servants employed by the Ministry of the Interior at that time. A digital copy of this directory, to which only a few officials have access, then ended up with a confidant of Herbert Kickl, Hans-Jörg Jenewein, the former FPÖ MP who was convicted last week of incitement to abuse of office (not legally binding).

She "is suspected of having given Hans-Jörg Jenewein the personnel register of the BMI, which was given to her exclusively by virtue of her office as a civil servant and staff representative of the Federal Ministry of the Interior," the officials write in their incident report. The "legitimate private interest in the secrecy of the personal and salary data of the employees of the BMI named therein" had been violated.

This data is a gold mine for the spies. In addition to the name of the civil servants, their home address and the service authority for which they work, it also contains the e-mail addresses and the employment groups. They could now easily send malware to the officers or shadow them at their private addresses.

How did the director of the office come into possession of the data? Officially, she requested it as a staff representative from her superior section head Michael Kloibmüller and then passed it on to Egisto Ott, according to the suspicion. Ott, in turn, is said to have passed on the material to the FPÖ man and Kickl confidant Hans-Jörg Jenewein, where the file was found on a stick during a raid - with the identification data of the office director.

The police officers summon the office director to the Ministry of the Interior for questioning on September 20, 2023 and asked her: "What was the reason for requesting the personnel directory?" She answers: "The staff representative elections." She had wanted to send the officer Kulis. The elections would not take place for another year, the police counter, why do they need the data now? "In order to be able to inform and look after the staff in the best possible way," she answers.

The public prosecutor's office believes the woman and discontinues the proceedings against her last August, "for reasons of evidence," as the file says. The investigating security authorities are surprised by this.

Why do the officers do all this? Did they know that behind Weiss and Ott was the suspected felon Jan Marsalek? Did they know that Marsalek works for Putin's intelligence officers? And what does MP Jenewein have to do with it? This leads to the next venue, the Regional Court for Criminal Matters in Vienna.

Vienna, Regional Court for Criminal Matters

Jenewein was sentenced to one year on probation last week in Room 203 for inciting a cabinet employee of Kickl to abuse of office. The Kickl secretary also received a one-year suspended prison sentence. The audience learned at the trial that Jenewein not only secretly photographed secret service agents during their interrogations in subcommittees and sent the photos on to Ott.

He also requested from Kickl's secretary the strictly protected names of secret service agents who traveled to Warsaw for a secret service meeting. Ott, on the other hand, was acquitted of passing on confidential information. It was not possible to prove where he got the information from, the court said.

Jan Marsalek's Connection

The Austrian Jan Marsalek is accused of having set up an "intelligence cell" in Vienna on behalf of the Russian secret service FSB, which hunts down dissidents, Putin critics and apostates.

His chats with Bulgarian agents deployed in Vienna show his sick imagination. He dreamed of poisoning Christo Grozev or murdering him with the help of an IS suicide bomber. Marsalek is also said to have financed the Wagner Group, a mercenary group, in Africa. The police are looking for him. He probably lives in Russia. The ex-BVT counterintelligence chief Martin Weiss helped him escape.

One question remains. Did money flow for all the information? And if so, from whom to whom? The Soko Fama has discovered some traces. During the search of Jenewein's apartment in Purkersdorf, the investigators found in a drawer an envelope with fee notes that Jenewein had addressed to a German company called Conef. The company's CEO is a lobbyist who also worked for Jan Marsalek. Jenewein invoiced around 60,000 euros, divided into installments of 12,000 euros each, for example for a "Ukraine Analysis". Conef, according to files, is a partner company of Wirecard. It is unclear whether payment was actually made.

Did Martin Weiss and Egisto Ott use the company as a sluice for money from Russia? "It should be noted," writes the Soko Fama, "that Jenewein was promised opportunities for financial advancement through Weiss and his entourage (via Egisto Ott) – on the one hand through commissioned work (paid preparation of a Ukraine analysis for the Conef company), and on the other hand through a job offer from Marsalek".

A chat shows why the police come up with such ideas: "Greetings from MW (Martin Weiss, note)," Egisto Ott wrote to Jenewein on October 2, 2019: "There is always a place available for you with his investor/financial service provider, I should tell you." The financial service provider, according to the criminal investigation, is Wirecard. Weiss also instructed Jenewein through Ott on how to claim the money from Conef.

Vienna, Rennweg

So what's actually going on here? A squad of Bulgarian agents is monitoring top police officers, top politicians and investigative journalists in Vienna on behalf of the Russian spy and suspected billionaire fraudster Jan Marsalek.

They do so using addresses provided by the suspended former top officials Egisto Ott and Weiss. Ott racks his brains over how to better cover up murders. While the British judiciary even condemns the small Minions in large trials, everyone is at large, even the agent who spied on Christo Grozev, who is to be murdered by Putin's henchmen.

Ott, as files show, not only wrote error analyses for Putin's killer, but he even wanted to found a "new secret service", which he settled in the foreign office of the then ruling minister and now Putin lobbyist Karin Kneissl. With him, Ott, in a leading position.

Ott and Weiss, by the way, were central figures who triggered the raid against the BVT and the suspension of the then boss Peter Gridling in 2018, which was later declared illegal.

Martin Weiss lives particularly unmolested – he fled to Dubai and, as a suspended civil servant, continues to receive two-thirds of his salary from the Republic, "because the criminal proceedings have not yet been concluded," as a spokesman for Interior Minister Gerhard Karner explained. He could not be ordered to Vienna, because he was suspended.

Egisto Ott is also still paid by the Republic. He sat in the courtroom last week and pompously and provocatively photographed the audience present, including journalists and police officers. "He is a state security officer," says his lawyer during the plea. "But unfortunately he is not allowed to protect the state, so he tries it privately."

Ott, Weiss and the director of the office do not want to comment on behalf of the Falter. Hans-Jörg Jenewein left inquiries unanswered.

And what else can the Office for the Protection of the Constitution do in the massive barracks on Rennweg in this country? A number of things would be necessary for Austria to be able to effectively protect itself from such espionage activities: more staff and a special public prosecutor's office that specialises in counter-espionage – as is customary in other countries. Stricter laws and disciplinary measures against so-called "internal offenders". And a criminal law paragraph that finally severely punishes espionage for a foreign intelligence service. At least this wish is already in the government program. What happened there is not a spy comedy, not a farce à la "Third Man", but deadly serious.

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Florian Klenk and Tessa Szyszkowitz talk to Raimund Löw about their research on Falter Radio.

About the author

Tessa Szyszkowitz

I am a columnist and London correspondent for Falter  and write primarily about foreign policy and the media.

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