The spy who boasted about bringing down a chancellor – while Europe kept dozing

Jan Marsalek, the fugitive former operations chief of Wirecard, boasted from Moscow that “we successfully brought down” Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. The network uncovered around him funneled phones belonging to the Interior Ministry to Russia, gathered data on refugees and journalists (it even obtained the home address of Christo Grozev, founder of the renowned investigative outlet Bellingcat, and passed it on to the Russians, who then broke into his home), while a plan to seize Austria's counterintelligence service was also reportedly in the works. The Russians were working to weaken Europe, while part of the European political elite readily supplied them with corruption, nepotistic personnel policies and reassuring self-deception.

Sebastian Kurz resigned as chancellor on 9 October 2021, after a corruption investigation reaching his inner circle brought down his government. At the time, investigators were examining whether the 35-year-old darling of conservative Europe and his associates had used public money to buy favorable opinion polls and media coverage. Thirteen days later, someone else was already celebrating the victory in a Moscow exchange of messages. Jan Marsalek, the vanished former head of Wirecard, wrote to Orlin Rusev, the head of the Bulgarian spy ring he ran: "we successfully brought down" the chancellor.

According to the conversation found in the investigative files reviewed by The Telegraph, Marsalek was especially eager to get hold of Thomas Schmid's phone, and he boasted of having had a hand in its seizure. Schmid, the secretary general of the Finance Ministry and later head of the state asset management agency, was a confidant of Kurz; Marsalek referred to him as the person who had handled their secret campaign financing. Austrian investigators seized his phone in November 2019, and the messages that surfaced from it triggered a series of corruption investigations, including the one that led, two years later, to the chancellor's resignation.

In Marsalek's own telling, the whole affair came across as a somewhat chaotic but effective operation: they got hold of the phone, and the rest of the messages took care of the chancellor. Austrian authorities are now investigating exactly how large his role in the events was, after material from the British investigation was added to the case file in the Ott–Marsalek affair. Through his lawyer, Kurz has requested access to the documents, and on 9 November in Vienna he said that, as someone affected, he is very curious about the outcome.

At this point, the European reader is tempted to lean back comfortably: a fugitive fraudster bragging to another criminal, that's just how the spy world works, surely it's exaggerated. Except that a network has emerged around Marsalek whose members had access to state data, to the whereabouts of persecuted individuals, and to the devices of high-ranking officials. One can argue about how much of the boasting was exaggeration; it is far harder to argue about how comfortably Moscow was able to move within European institutions.

Until June 2020, Marsalek, as chief operating officer of Germany's Wirecard, was considered one of the showcase figures of financial modernization. The company was the pride of the German stock exchange until it emerged that 1.9 billion euros in supposedly existing funds had simply vanished. Marsalek then fled Austria for Minsk by private jet, and ultimately found refuge in Russia. According to British prosecutors, he worked primarily for the FSB and relayed the instructions of Russian services to Rusev.

The Bulgarian group, based in Britain, surveilled Kremlin critics and investigative journalists across Europe, discussed kidnappings and planned disinformation operations. When Rusev was arrested in 2023, British police seized his devices, and the messages found on them opened one door after another behind which the group's work had until then proceeded undisturbed. In May 2025, six members of the network were sentenced to a combined total of more than fifty years in prison, with Rusev receiving ten years and eight months. Marsalek, meanwhile, remains beyond the reach of European authorities in his Russian refuge.

One of the key figures in the Austrian story was Egisto Ott, a former officer of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counter Terrorism (BVT). In May 2026, a Vienna court sentenced him in the first instance to four years and one month in prison; the case centered on abuse of office, corruption, unauthorized data collection and aiding Russian intelligence. A laptop with special security equipment ended up in Russia, as did the phones of senior Interior Ministry officials. The story of the latter is almost insultingly illustrative of European state diligence. Three devices got soaked in a canoeing accident in 2017 and were handed over for data recovery; according to the investigation, they then ended up with Marsalek's network, after which Rusev arranged in 2022 for them to be shipped from Vienna via Istanbul to Russia. So Austrian officials wanted their data back, while Russian services were just as eager to get hold of the very same data. This, too, is presumably a particularly generous interpretation of Austria's famed neutrality: no borders should stand in the way of the Interior Ministry's secrets. Any resemblance to the Hungarian foreign ministry led by Szijjártó and Viktor Orbán's regime is, of course, surely pure coincidence.

Ott also gathered information on people who had fled Russia, including a former intelligence officer who had fallen out of favor with Putin. According to the prosecution, he was also the one who tracked down the secret Vienna address of investigative journalist Christo Grozev ; Grozev's home was later broken into. Regarding the 2019 assassination carried out in Berlin's Tiergarten on orders of the Russian state, he prepared an analysis for Moscow that the prosecution described as guidance that could be used for future assassinations in Europe.

At this point, it is already very hard to speak of innocent diplomatic curiosity. The address of a refugee, the movements of a journalist, or an analysis of the mistakes made in a murder are valuable precisely because they can be used to reach people, intimidate them and put them in danger. Those who believed that, having arrived in Austria, they had escaped Putin's grasp may have had their data handed back to their persecutors by one of the very officials of the state that had taken them in. Europe gave them shelter, and then, through its own institution, showed Moscow exactly which doorbell to ring.

According to a Telegraph investigation from March 2025, Marsalek had even bigger plans: he wanted to discredit the BVT and create a new service to be headed by someone loyal to him. Let's be clear: gaining control of an entire intelligence and counterintelligence organization would have offered far greater possibilities than just a few bought officials, since through Austria, Moscow could have gotten closer to the information held by British and other European partner services as well. Favorable conditions for the plan were created by the BVT scandal that erupted under Interior Minister Herbert Kickl. A raid on the agency carried out in February 2018 on a prosecutor's request and with judicial authorization—later ruled unlawful—together with the political campaign surrounding the agency, also shook the trust of foreign partners: the BVT withdrew from certain working groups of the Berne Club, and international partners restricted the sharing of information with it. So while the people of the Russian network worked from the inside, Austrian politics guaranteed the chaos from the outside; the takeover plan described by The Telegraph was ultimately derailed by the Ibiza scandal and the FPÖ's fall from government in 2019.

This year the story gained new chapters. In July, Ott and his former superior, Martin Weiss, were charged again over a leaked BVT document. According to the prosecution, Ott had already sent a 26-page dossier to a journalist back in 2017, containing the names and positions of Interior Ministry employees along with allegations against the agency. Moscow doesn't need to manufacture every scandal itself. Part of the European political elite diligently produces usable material on its own: publicly funded propaganda, jobs handed out on the basis of personal loyalty, covered-up abuses, and files compiled against one another. The Russians simply look for which grievance, deal or career ambition can be put to use for their own purposes. We sometimes call this a quirk of domestic politics, and then we're surprised when a copy of our own quirks turns up in Moscow.

Russia is deliberately seeking to weaken and destabilize Europe, and espionage is only one branch of that effort. EU institutions themselves describe sabotage, attacks on critical infrastructure, information manipulation and interference in elections as part of a sustained, coordinated Russian campaign. The goal is a Europe that is quarrelling with itself, intimidated, no longer trusting even its own institutions, and therefore easier to dissuade from supporting Ukraine or organizing its own defense. Yet some European decision-makers seem to be waiting for Putin himself to leave a personal calling card next to some hacked server, blown-up railway section or stolen phone. Until then, one can keep phrasing things delicately, organizing another round of talks, and concluding that the situation is a cause for concern. In Moscow, they are surely relieved to read that our concern continues to function flawlessly.

In Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa, people have far less room for such comfortable detachment. They know the intentions of the Russian state from the missiles and drones that strike their homes. Europe doesn't need to wait for the same fate to start taking seriously the destruction under way in its own institutions, transport systems and public life, because a bought-and-paid-for official, a stolen address or a dismantled counterintelligence service are already attacks in themselves — and every successful operation makes the next one easier.

Marsalek boasted about bringing down a chancellor. But Europe should already find enough reason for shame in what the conversations and actions of the network uncovered around him reveal: while the Russians worked methodically, too many European leaders decided that defending themselves was inconvenient, costly, and might even strain good relations. In the end, the good relations survived. Just not the ones between our interior ministries and theirs — it was the ones between our interior ministries and their intelligence services.

Anna Karczag

Ugar