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In 2013, Austrian Jan Marsalek was 33, and had been the chief operating officer of German technology giant “Wirecard” for 3 years.
He had risen to the top despite not even having a high school diploma, but he had a knack for programming and a charisma that was noted by everyone who worked with him.
Founded in 1999, “Wirecard” was one of the first to process online payments. At first, its main customers were pornographic sites and online gambling platforms. However, after the 2008 financial crisis, the company gained support from German politicians who wanted to develop the country’s financial sector. “Wirecard” began to be called Germany’s answer to “PayPal”.
In 2018, “Wirecard” was among the thirty most valuable companies in Germany and operated on every continent except Antarctica. The following year, Chancellor Angela Merkel, during a visit to China, lobbied for “Wirecard”, which was about to acquire a Chinese financial technology company.
A year later, law enforcement officers came to the “Wirecard” headquarters. It turned out that the company had been falsifying financial statements for years, and a hole of €1.9 billion was discovered in its balance sheet. The “Wirecard” collapse became the largest financial scandal in post-war German history, and its executives were charged with criminal offenses.
Journalists near the “Wirecard” headquarters near Munich, July 1, 2020. Two weeks earlier, the companyʼs management officially acknowledged a deficit of €1.9 billion.
Getty Images / «Babel'»
All these problems awaited Marsalek in the future, but in 2013 he was worried about something else — a deal with the Moscow Metro, to which “Wirecard” offered a contactless payment system via NFC, was on the verge of collapse.
It was then that Natalia Zlobina appeared in Marsalekʼs life. It is about a Russian erotic model and trash-movie actress who was recommended to him through her connections in the Moscow administration.
“Wirecard” never reached an agreement with the Moscow Metro, but Marsalek and Zlobinaʼs relationship continued. He picked her up on a private jet, and then they traveled together to Spain and Greece.
In September 2013, the couple went to Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. According to eyewitnesses, the clan of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov kept $100 million in Hong Kong and was looking for a way to launder this money and withdraw it to accounts in Western Europe. Zlobina introduced Marsalek as someone who could help. It is unknown whether they reached an agreement at that time.
Not much is known about Natalia Zlobinaʼs career. The media reports that she played a spy in the Russian-American erotic vampire thriller "Red Lips 2: Bloodlust" in 1996. The film does indeed feature an actress with that name, but Zlobina was only 12 years old at the time.
Соцмережі / The Insider
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On July 6, 2014, Zlobina celebrated her 30th birthday on the super-yacht “Poseidon III”, which was docked off the coast of Nice.
On board, she introduced Marsalek to one of her acquaintances named Stas. Other party guests mentioned that Stas was a General.
Stas’s full name is Stanislav Petlinskyi. In the 1990s, during the Russian-Chechen wars, he commanded a unit of GRU, and later worked in the State Duma and the Presidential Administration.
In 2014, Petlinsky called himself a “security adviser”, but Austrian investigators believe he continued to work for GRU, as well as FSB, specifically its 6th Service. Formally, this unit is responsible for the FSB’s own security, but in reality it controls other Russian security agencies and interferes in economic affairs to redistribute assets in favor of the Kremlin elite.
After meeting Petlinskyi, Marsalek began to travel to Russia much more often. During these trips, his new friend introduced him to high-ranking intelligence officers, oligarchs, and officials of various levels.
One of them, a stocky bearded man, Petlinskyi introduced just as Vladimir. Under this pseudonym, the man served in GRU (including under Petlinskyi in Chechnya). His real name was Anatoly Karaziy, and at that time he headed the intelligence of the PMC Wagner.
Jan Marsalek and Stanislav Petlinskyi. The Insider writes that on at least one other occasion, Zlobina helped Petlinskyi establish contact with a person of interest to Russian intelligence services.
Соцмережі / The Insider
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In May 2017, Petlinsky and Karaziy organized a trip for Marsalek to Palmyra, Syria, which the Russian army had just recaptured from the Islamic State.
The Austrian returned from there excited, showing friends photos of himself in military gear and telling them that he had been allowed to shoot at the Islamists. Petlinskyi describes the story more modestly — according to him, Marsalek was allowed to fire an RPG once and, perhaps, was waved towards the front line.
Marsalek also returned from Palmyra with a new business idea that would connect the PMC “Wagner” with the Middle East. That same year, he contacted Kilian Kleinschmidt (a former UN humanitarian who was then working on migration projects in Africa for Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern).
They met at a Michelin-starred restaurant, where Marsalek offered Kleinschmidt €200 000 to prepare a study on the reconstruction of Libya, a country that had been in civil war since 2011.
Kleinschmidt was to bill the Russian-Libyan Institute of Culture in Moscow, i.e. to bill an organization that did not actually exist.
Marsalek and Petlinskyi in Syria. Marsalek near the ruins of Roman monuments in Palmyra, Syria. One of Marsalekʼs friends said he was an avid art and history fan and was very upset when the Islamic State began blowing up ancient monuments.
Соцмережі / The Insider
Marsalek never paid Kleinschmidt the full amount promised, but in February 2018 they met again at a businessman’s villa in Munich. Marsalek then proposed training 15 000–20 000 militiamen in Libya to control the country’s southern border and, at the same time, the flow of migrants from Africa to Europe.
Marsalek also talked about the new body cameras of the “Wagnerians” and offered to sell recordings of battles. He complained that the videos that had already been shot were not suitable for this, because in them “the guys shoot all the prisoners”.
Kleinschmidt refused such cooperation, and in the end he received only €80 000 of the promised €200 000.
Kilian Kleinschmidt and German Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development Gerd Müller at the UN camp for Syrian refugees in Zaatari in Jordan, February 17, 2014. Kleinschmidt was the director of the camp.
Getty Images / «Babel'»
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At the same time, Marsalek was solidifying his position within “Wirecard”, effectively becoming the head of corporate intelligence.
He hired private investigators, including former intelligence officers, to monitor the “Wirecard” critics. Some of them were later subjected to cyberattacks, and journalist Fahmi Quadir, who was investigating the company’s machinations, was hit in the head with a brass knuckle in early 2020.
In 2015, Marsalek brought Martin Weiss in, who by then had long been the head of the Second Department of the Austrian counterintelligence agency BVT, to help with this work.
This unit was responsible for information collection, operational analysis, and counterintelligence. Weiss brought with him his subordinate Egisto Ott. Through the BVT’s internal databases, which were shared with other Western intelligence agencies, Weiss combed through information on more than two dozen people to find out what the West knew about them. Among them were the following: Marsalek’s family, Petlinskyi, journalists living in Europe (including Russian ones), and a Kazakh oppositionist.
Ott used a closed system of data exchange between police officers of European countries to search for information. Through an Italian police officer, he found out that the mistress of the oligarch close to Putin — Arkady Rotenberg — and her sister had a flag in the European border system, which was introduced by Latvia. Because of it, the women had problems entering the Schengen zone.
Another time, Ott helped track down a Russian defector spy. To do this, he sent his fingerprints to European colleagues, stating that he was suspected of terrorism. In 2017, the US CIA and the British MI6 warned Austrian services that Ott could be spying for Russia. After that, he was suspended from work in counterintelligence.
Investigators became interested in Egisto Ott in 2017 when he was tracking a defecting Russian spy. Ott tracked down the man, but the Russian managed to avoid retaliation from his former colleagues.
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In his inner circle, Marsalek constantly boasted about his connections with intelligence agencies of various countries. He said that “Wirecard” produces credit cards for intelligence agencies from all over the world, and that he himself cooperates with British and American intelligence agencies, the Israeli Mossad and the German foreign intelligence agency BND.
Marsalek once said that he needed a complete set of data on “Wirecard” customers — supposedly to pass on to German intelligence.
German intelligence agencies deny that they ever asked him for this.
How real Marsalekʼs other connections were is unknown. It is possible that he simply made up these stories. However, everyone around him knew about his close relations with the Russians.
In a conversation with a colleague, Marsalek joked that the Russians would shoot journalists who asked unnecessary questions, and he advised anyone with complaints about the “Wirecard” financial reports to contact Putin.
In order to appear less often at the “Wirecard” Munich office, Marsalek set up his own office in a four-story villa opposite the Russian consulate in Munich. A figurine of Putin stood on his desk.
At the same time, the Russian special services took up a much more ambitious project — they wanted to establish control over the Austrian counterintelligence agency BVT.
Marsalekʼs estate is next to the Russian Consulate General in Munich.
Getty Images / «Babel'»
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In April 2017, Austria was preparing for parliamentary elections scheduled for October of that year.
The center-right Peopleʼs Party, led by a young charismatic leader Sebastian Kurz had the best chance of winning. Their most likely coalition partner was the far-right and pro-Russian Freedom Party of Austria (FPA).
It was founded by SS veterans, but over the course of more than half a century it has grown from a marginal force to one of the countryʼs main parties. After the elections, FPA wanted to take over the Interior Ministry, and with it control over the BVT counterintelligence.
At the same time, in April 2017, journalists and prosecutors began to receive an anonymous dossier on alleged abuses at BVT. Investigators believe that it was prepared by Weiss and Ott.
The authors accused counterintelligence of corruption, of spending public funds on sex parties, and of misusing confidential data. Real insider details about BVTʼs covert operations were skillfully mixed with fiction, making even the nonsense seem convincing.
During the coalition negotiations, Marsalek, through the Austrian-Russian Friendship Society, passed compromising information about the BVT leadership to the pro-Russian head of FPA faction Johann Gudenus.
In November 2017, he sent Gudenus the case number that BVT allegedly opened against the Freedom Party. Therefore, having gained control of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the FPA leaders were sure that counterintelligence was working against them.
On February 28, 2018, dozens of police officers, armed with pistols and a battering ram, stormed the BVT headquarters. The operation was commanded by the commander of the special unit for combating street crime Wolfgang Preisler and a local FPA politician.
The officers did not know what to look for, so they took everything in a row — from paper documents to servers and flash drives. In total, they seized 40 terabytes of data. Among them was the main target of the operation — the “Neptune” base on a hard drive, which stored secret materials that foreign intelligence services had been passing on to Austria for years.
It is not known whether the Russians copied the “Neptune” base. However, after the raid, foreign intelligence services stopped transmitting classified data to Austria. BVT lost the trust of its partners, and its director Peter Gridling was suspended for the duration of the investigation.
Martin Weiss resigned and settled in an office in Marsalekʼs villa. Egisto Ott was transferred to another position in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but he retained access to secret bases — for example, after GRU agents poisoned former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia with the nerve agent “Novichok” in Salisbury, the Russians wanted to know what the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons knew about the poison.
Ott copied its secret report and gave it to Marsalek. At the same time, Ott was developing a plan for a new intelligence service at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where representatives of FPA promised him an important position. The Russians were close to taking complete control of the Austrian intelligence services, but “Ibiza Gate” prevented them from completing the plan.
As of February 2018, Peter Gridling had been the head of BVT for ten years. Three months later, in May, the court overturned the decision to remove him, and in November of the same year, the criminal case for abuse of office against him was closed due to the absence of a crime.
osce.org
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In July 2017, “Freedom Party” leader and future Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache and the head of the FPA parliamentary group Johann Gudenus arrived at a luxury villa in the Spanish resort of Ibiza.
A woman who identified herself as the niece of Russian oligarch Igor Makarov and her companion were waiting for them. During an hour-long meeting with plenty of alcohol, Strache offered the guests lucrative government contracts in exchange for helping the FPA in the elections.
For example, he wanted the so-called “niece” to buy a controlling stake in Austria’s largest daily newspaper — Kronen Zeitung — and help create “the kind of media landscape that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán created in Hungary”.
The meeting was a trap. The woman was not related to the Russian oligarch, and her “companion” was a corporate security consultant named Julian Hessenthaler, who secretly recorded the conversation.
According to him, they were asked to do this by a lawyer friend, and they were guided by a sense of civic duty. In May 2019, a few days before the European Parliament elections, they gave the video to journalists.
The publication sparked mass protests in Austria. The government coalition collapsed, Strache and Gudenus resigned, and early parliamentary elections were announced in the country.
Along with the coalition, Marsalek and the Russiansʼ plan to take control of the Austrian intelligence services also failed.
In 2020, after several years of journalistic investigations, German law enforcement officers took up the “Wirecard” machinations. Now Marsalek had to flee.
After "Ibiza Gate", Heinz-Christian Strache retired from high-profile politics. Today, a case has been opened against him for bribery in the gambling business. A still from the "Ibiza Gate" video. From left to right: then-chairman of the FPA parliamentary faction Johann Gudenus, his wife Tayana, and Julian Hessenthaler (who posed as a business partner of the Russian oligarchʼs niece).
Getty Images / «Babel'»; Wikimedia / Скриншот / Der Spiegel
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When it became clear that “Wirecard” was missing almost two billion euros, Jan Marsalek told colleagues that he was flying to the Philippines to look for the missing money.
To make this story seem plausible, he bribed Philippine immigration officials, and false records of his arrival appeared in government databases. In fact, Martin Weiss organized a charter flight for Marsalek to Minsk.
From Belarus, Marsalek went to Moscow. The transfer was arranged by an acquaintance of Petlinskyi, a Russian official who deals with relations with Libya. A few weeks later, he was issued a passport in the name of Konstantin Bayazov (a priest of a small temple of the Russian Orthodox Church, who looks a bit like an Austrian). Marsalek later had other documents. One of the passports was in the name of Vitaliy Malkin (another real priest of the Russian Orthodox Church).
Marsalek was previously primarily associated with GRU, but in late 2021 he began to work more closely with FSB and regularly visited its headquarters in Lubyanka. He has also been to the occupied territories of Ukraine — several times in Crimea, including accompanied by Russian special forces, and probably to the territories occupied after 2022.
In February 2024, his phone went offline for 12 days, then reappeared near the “Mitrofanivka” railway station in Russia, near the occupied Luhansk region. In photos from these trips, Marsalek posed in full military gear, with a “Z”-shaped patch.
The Insiderʼs source in the Russian intelligence services claims that he participated in combat missions, but does not specify which ones. During two trips to Ukraine, Marsalek was accompanied by Russian photographer Sergei Bermenyev, known for his portraits of celebrities.
A priest from a small church in the Lipetsk region Konstantin Bayazov looks a bit like Marsalek — especially after he grew a beard. Jan Marasalek in a Russian uniform near the border with the occupied Luhansk region, February 2024.
Соцмережі / The Insider
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The main thing Marsalek did in Russia was coordinate a spy network.
It included 6 Bulgarian citizens, led by Bulgarian-British businessman Orlin Rusev, who had known Marsalek since his days at “Wirecard”.
Since August 2020, the group has been monitoring Russians in Europe who were of interest to FSB, planning abductions and assassinations, and monitoring barracks in Stuttgart, where, according to the Russians, Ukrainian soldiers were trained.
The group had equipment for making fake documents and intercepting data from mobile phones. The agents hid cameras and microphones in ties, ballpoint pens, and Coca-Cola bottles, and disguised them as stones.
In February 2023, members of the group were arrested in the UK. Investigators found more than 80 000 messages on Rusev’s phone, including correspondence with Rupert Thix (it is the name under which Jan Marsalek was hiding).
In the spring of 2025, all 6 were sentenced to prison. Rusev received the longest sentence — 10 years and 8 months.
Bulgarian citizens from the group coordinated by Marsalek. Orlin Rusev is on the top left.
«Babel'»
At the end of the trial, Rusevʼs lawyer, trying to get a softer sentence, told about another episode.
According to him, in August 2021, when American troops were leaving Afghanistan and the Taliban were seizing power, CIA asked Marsalek to organize charter flights to evacuate Americans from Kabul. The lawyer called Rusevʼs participation in this case a humanitarian act and asked the court to take this into account when passing sentence.
On August 17, 2021, Marsalek did indeed write to Rusev about an "interesting request from friends in CIA" related to charter flights. They then discussed the types of aircraft and the security of the Kabul airport. It is unknown how true Marsalekʼs words were.
From the correspondence, it became known that among the group’s targets were The Insider investigators Christo Grozev and Roman Dobrokhotov, who had written extensively about Marsalek.
Discussions about monitoring them began in 2020, after the investigation into the poisoning of Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny with “Novichok” by FSB agents. They also discussed how to abduct or kill journalists.
Rusev wrote that Grozev should be eliminated “like Stepan Bandera in Germany or Leon Trotsky in Mexico”. Marsalek replied that instead of the ice pick with which the NKVD agent killed Trotsky, a sledgehammer would be more suitable, like, in the style of the PMC “Wagner”.
Methods of killing Dobrokhotov, discussed by Rusev and Marsalek:
Ricin poison — Rusev wrote that he had 150 grams of ricin.
Poisonous frog toxin.
An accident in the shower.
Head-on collision between Dobrokhotovʼs car and a truck.
Poison dart from a drone.
Pour acid over.
Burn alive in the middle of the street to cause public shock.
Add the nerve agent VX to a can of Coca-Cola, shake it, and open it near Dobrokhotov so that the spray would hit his face (they believe that something similar was done by the Israeli Mossad).
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In their correspondence, Marsalek and Rusev discussed more than just espionage operations.
In 2021, Marsalek boasted that his men had successfully overthrown Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (leader of the Austrian People’s Party) by stealing the phone of his finance ministry colleague Thomas Schmidt. The correspondence found on the phone later led to searches of Kurz’s party and corruption charges.
After the full-scale invasion began, much of Marsalek and Rusev’s conversations revolved around the war against Ukraine. In particular, they discussed how to improve Russian military equipment. In one message, Marsalek wrote that his “Chinese friends” in the Navy were asking if he could sell them some of the American “Switchblade” kamikaze drones used by the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
In June 2022, he reported that he would soon receive money to purchase four or five drones from China, and within the next two or three weeks, a "a substantial sum [of money]" and the opportunity to join a China-Russian drone production project.
In 2024, a court gave former Chancellor Sebastian Kurz an eight-month suspended sentence for lying to a parliamentary committee in a corruption case. The following year, an appeals court overturned the decision.
Getty Images / «Babel'»
Whether there was anything real behind these words is unknown. Marsalek could just have been making it up, just as he had previously told unconfirmed stories about his connections with various intelligence agencies.
Although, perhaps, as an entrepreneur, he was constantly generating new business ideas and counting on at least one of them to work and bring profit.
According to Western intelligence agencies, Marsalek now regularly visits Dubai and cooperates with new Russian private military companies that have replaced the PMC “Wagner”.