The Rest Is Classified - 42. Putin’s Minions: The Master in Moscow (Ep 2)

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

The game is afoot, and the stakes are higher than ever. Who was the real villain in the Minions spy saga? How did a fintech tycoon become a key player in Russian espionage? And what does this case reveal about the Kremlin's increasingly brazen tactics? As the story of the Bulgarian spy ring unfolds, a web of deception and international intrigue emerges. The key to the puzzle lies in the identity of the handler, a man whose double life and connections to Russian intelligence raise troubling questions about the reach of the Kremlin's power. Listen as Gordon and David follow the money, messages, and Minions to expose the truth behind this audacious act of espionage. ------------------- Order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, ⁠via this link.⁠ Pre-order a signed edition of Gordon's latest book, The Spy in the Archive, ⁠via this link.⁠ ------------------- Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼⁠ www.nordvpn.com/restisclassified⁠ It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Exclusive INCOGNI Deal: To get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan, go to ⁠incogni.com/restisclassified⁠ Email: [e-mail] Twitter: ⁠@triclassified⁠ Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From early morning workouts that need a boost, to late night drives that need vibes, a good playlist can help you make the most out of your everyday. And when it comes to everyday spending, you can count on the PC Insider's World Elite MasterCard to help you earn the most PC optimum points everywhere you shop. With the best playlists, you never miss a good song. With this card, you never miss out on getting the most points on everyday purchases. The PC Insider's World's Elite Mastercard. The card for living unlimited.

Conditions apply to all benefits. Visit pcfinancial.ca for details. Can we use this in sea-catchin' Germany? We need to spawn Ukrainians at a German military base. Sure we can. Germany? Vend it to spy on Ukrainians at a German military base? Sure we can. Both are sitting and gathering dust in my Indiana Jones garage. Do you have a qualified minion?

One, yes. Only one? A new task currently under development. Go on a tour in Germany for one or two days. There has to be observation made for the entrance to a training regiment for Ukrainian soldiers. Welcome to The Rest Is Classified, I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrera.

And that was not us reading chat GPT prompts in strange accents. That was, in fact, a series of messages exchanged between a very mysterious handler in Russia and the leader of a Bulgarian spy ring in London, a group that's just been convicted and whose story we're looking at in this closing episode, part two of the Minions spy ring. And Gordon, last time we looked at how this group of minions is kind of weird, I guess almost slow horses like story of this Bulgarian spy ring that's being run out of a guest house at the wonderfully beautiful Norfolk beach up on the British coast. There's a six person group, many of whom are sleeping with each other and all of whom have very strange sort of nicknames and jobs.

They've all been carrying out surveillance on opponents of the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin. They had been hatching this plot to spy on Ukrainians that were training at a US military base on an air defense system. And the group, they've been very active carrying out these surveillance operations. And this time, we are going to finally get to the identity of this mysterious handler in Russia. Yeah, so you read with a brilliant accent, which might become more explicable when we get to it. It's a hint.

That's right. You've brilliantly done, David. I thought really, really, really like a true novelist. Thank you. You just dropped the clues there. That's right. I'm playing 3D chess here. I'm playing 3D chess here. So last time we saw how on February 8th, 2023, this group was busted by the police in Britain

that series of coordinated arrests. That 33-room Great Yarmouth Hotel was being raided as well as some of the flats in London. And it is staggering what they find. It was an Aladdin's cave of kind of spy kit. And I'm going to be interested to see what you make of it in a minute. But let me just quickly run through what's there. 221 mobile phones. I mean, that's more than most people. 258 hard drives, 495 SIM cards, 33 audio recording devices, 55 visual recording devices, 11 drones, 16

radios. Now, I mean, that's a lot, we should first of all say. No piranha guns, no squid launchers, no cheese rays. Are these minions reference? Those are minions references. I told you, I sort of previewed, I think, in the first episode that I had gone deep into minions, wikis and fandom. And I have compiled a list, which I am looking at right now, of different minions sort of previewed, I think, in the first episode that I had gone deep into minions, wikis and fandom, and I have compiled a list which I am looking at right now of different minions sort of spy kit.

So I'm displeased that the actual Bulgarian minions did not have any of this stuff. They did have some interesting stuff. They had covert surveillance devices, which are kind of hidden in everyday objects. So for instance, there's one in a Coke bottle where there's a kind of hidden camera in the Coke bottle. There's hidden cameras in rocks, lighters, car keys. Some of them have got SIM cards attached to them so that they can live stream the video. They had some sunglasses or glasses which were capable of recording. Gabarova, who you remember from our first episode, is the beautician from Acton. She seems to have accidentally taken her own picture at one point in a mirror with the glasses, which is not top-trade craft.

Submitted as evidence. Exactly. They find listening devices inside computer mouses, in smoke detectors, in a coat hook. It's going to get people paranoid about what's in their houses now. Everyone's going to be kind of checking it. Even in jewelry? I mean, yeah, hidden jewelry. Yeah.

They've got computer network exploitation devices, as they're described, with names such as pineapples, coconuts, turtles, bash bunnies, rubber duckies, packet squirrels, keycrocs, plunderbugs, and shark jacks. I mean, who comes up with that stuff? If any plunderbug manufacturers are out there, we are seeking sponsorship. Having lost our sponsorship from the Norfolk tourism board, you know, that went up in flames in episode one. So plunder bug manufacturers, please reach out.

The rest is classified. Or shark jacks. Or shark jack tools. Shark jacks. We'll also accept them. Packet. Packet squirrels. Yeah. All of these are basically intended to intercept communications on an insecure Wi-Fi network,

right? Exactly. To gather information from Wi-Fi networks. They've got car key cloning devices, GPS, trackers with magnets. They've got radio frequency identification, cloning equipment. They've also got things which could clone the access cards for hotels and buildings, night vision binoculars, scanners, jammers, earpieces, you know, the type you see the kind of Secret Service wearing.

Anti-gravity serum? No. Oh, and hold on. Minions. That's on my Nefario list. I'm sorry. Across the streams here. If they could have had it, they would have had it, I think. They would have had it. That's on my Nefario list. I'm sorry. Across the streams here.

If they could have had it, they would have had it, I think. They would have had it. That's right. Also, fake ID card printers and fake IDs, 75 passports. I like the fact they had fake press credentials trying to pose as journalists, including credentials for the US Discovery and National Geographic channels. Also branded clothing. They had lots of like branded clothing

like DHL and Deliveroo uniforms. So you can pose as drivers. So it sounds like a ton of stuff, but come on David, you're the former spy. How good is this stuff? Is this like dressing up box for CIA people or is this like amateur hour? I have friends who were in the business

for a very long time in kind of the tech side. And what they would say is, it used to be the case that to run, really, let's use this as an example, right, to run a proper surveillance operation in a professional manner, you needed a few million dollars and the DS&T, right, the Directorate of Science and Technology at the CIA, it's making all this tech, right? Now you need a few hundred bucks in Best Buy, right?

Which is an electronics store. A big box. Do you not have Best Buys? No, we don't. Okay. Oh, wow. Okay. All right. Electronic store, isn't it?

Consumer electronics. Yeah, a big electronics, yeah, consumer electronics store. So it's speaking to something true, which is I think the gap between what spy agencies are using and what's commercially available has kind of narrowed. It's not closed entirely because there's still probably a tremendous amount of tech and particular capabilities that are still inside government exclusively. And off the private market. still inside government exclusively and off the private market. But I think that gap's narrowed.

And I think many capabilities that previously were only in the hands of governments and spy agencies are now out in the wild and have been commercialized. And the reality is this long list that you just went through, I think this shows a level of seriousness and commitment to the work of a surveillance. I mean, they have a big tool shed of anything they might need to keep tabs on a target, right? And keep in mind, almost all of the people they're surveilling, let's put aside the Ukrainians at the base for a second, but all the other people they're surveilling are kind of private citizens. And so they're not going after professional intelligence officers. They're watching people. I mean, Kristogorov, I'm sure has some sense of tradecraft because he knows

Putin's got a mark on him. But again, he's not working for spy agencies. So I think what they have here is probably effective kit for a lot of the sort of operations that they've been given from this shadowy handler in Moscow. Yeah, that makes sense, doesn't it? It's good enough for what they need to do, which is spy on ordinary people and gather information about them. It's amazing that stuff is commercially available. I mean, there are shops, you can buy it online.

I mean, it's often sold as for people who want to kind of keep track on their spouse or something like that, but you kind of go, it's pretty dark stuff that you can buy all the spy kits and use it. The MC Grabber we talked about last time is more or less in the realm of like law enforcement in most countries and is very expensive. So they're operating with pretty sophisticated kit. I mean, I'm joking about Best Buy, you know, but I mean, they couldn't buy all of this at Best Buy. I mean, they're getting this through connections in Russia. That's exactly right that the MC grabber, the MC catcher, which they were going to use to capture and to kind of identify Ukrainian service personnel in Stuttgart, that is something

which isn't commercially available. That is the one bit which is really high end and it's not quite clear where they got it from, but you can take a guess. But just one more detail because you remember with all our Minions references they were described as the Minions by Rusev the spiring boss from Great Yarmouth to Moscow and Minion was attached to one of the numbers of the people in the phones. But also one important detail in Ivanova's flat, they find a surveillance camera hidden inside a 20 centimeter minion soft toy. And so there is a picture of that. And it's got I mean, it's so I find it kind of sad that a lovely thing like a minion has been subverted into a tool of

Spies Russia, Putin's Russia. So I mean, it's nothing sacred in this world, that even the minions are being used by Putin's spies. Seeing this picture of this minion, this minion spy camera, it did make me wonder, did it come out that that was deployed operationally? Because I don't, I don't see a lot of uses for this. But I maybe I'm not using my, my full imagination. Because you'd have to kind of hold it in front of someone to be used as a spy camera. I don't know. I mean, based off of the mug shots that I've seen of all these Bulgarians, this minion's plush toy isn't really fitting with any of these people. They're not going to be carrying these around.

So I don't know. I think this is a case where, like in the MK Ultra episodes that we did on CIA mind control and Sydney Gottlieb, there was a lot of tech in there that kind of seemed like a bunch of people kind of just having fun and doing crazy things because they could. And the Minion plush toy with the camera in it kind of seems like they had six martinis up there in Norfolk and just decided to put a camera in a Minion toy. So they're finding a lot of this stuff, not all of it, but a lot of it in this kind of great Yarmouth former hotel, which when you see the pictures of it, I mean, it's like a kind of, it looks more like a junk shop, like a junkyard. They're just boxes and stuff just littering the place. Really messy, as we said, not really an Indiana Jones warehouse. But also, crucially, the police are able to recover 200,000 messages which were sent on the Telegram communications network.

But they find all these messages, they haven't been encrypted or the devices are open, which is a bit small. That seems like an oversight. It seems like it. Yeah. It's going to prove to be a very poor move by the minions and their bosses. Because amongst other things, there are close to 80,000 messages between Rusev, the great Yarmuth, Dr. Nefario. Is it Dr. Nefario? Mr.v, the great Yarmuth, Dr. Nefario,

was it Dr. Nefario? Mr. Nefario? Whatever he is. Dr. Nefario, yes. I don't know where... That's another piece of trivia that I don't have is where he received his doctorate. I don't think he's a medical doctor. I believe he has a PhD, but I don't know where, like what institution he got that from. Maybe we're going too much down the Minions side track, but that's okay. But there's 80,000 messages between him and a man who uses the pseudonym Rupert Tiz. And now this is the message. Is that how you pronounce that name? I don't know. T-I-C-Z?

Tics. Maybe tics. Tics. It's a weird. Rupert Tics. But it turns out, now this is clear from the messages. This is the man sending the orders from Russia. But here's the plot twist. He's not Russian.

My accent from the beginning. Your accent at the beginning was the giveaway. He is an Austrian businessman, Jan Masilek. Now, this is where I think the story takes a particularly crazy turn. This is the point it gets crazy. It gets even crazier. Because this is not just some random low level businessman. This is an incredibly famous Austrian businessman in his time, who'd been chief operating officer of a company called Wirecard, which was a major fintech

champion in Germany, like a huge German tech success story. When Germany was thinking like, what champions do we have in the tech sector? If you'd asked them five, ten years ago, they'd have said Wirecard is the story. It's like a payments processor company based in Munich. And he is the chief operating officer for it. I mean, it's insane. It's crazy. I mean, so he's a strange character. It's clear he had fingers in lots of pies, politics, business, and we learn later spying. So he's running a fintech business, while also trying to recruit militias to control borders in Libya. I mean, that's kind of unusual. He lives in this palatial villa in Munich, opposite the Russian consulate. And he's involved in the Austrian Russian Friendship Society. Hmm, I mean, you know, he likes Russia.

Yeah. So all this going well at Wirecard, it's this big champion until a brilliant Financial Times investigation raises questions about its finances. Now, the journalists who did this, I mean, it's an amazing story, because they start questioning whether there's something fishy around Wirecard. And then the pressure on the Financial Times is enormous. And there's surveillance and there's pressure on the editor to try and kind of deal with this investigation clearly because they know that they're gonna find something.

And in the end, it turns out that, you know, more than a billion euros is basically missing from the company and the whole thing is gonna go under. But before he can be arrested, and some of the others involved, some of the other executives are arrested, Jan Marcelek does a runner, which is a technical term. He claims he's going to the Philippines and he leaves a trail of messages to make it look like he's in Asia. But that looks

like a red herring because he does a kind of spy style escape to Belarus on a private jet and then ends up in Moscow. Now here's the great detail. That route of how he got out is tracked and revealed by none other than Christo Grozev, a Bellingcat who, as we learned last time, is one of the people the minions are tracking. But now, this businessman, he's a fugitive, Yamar Sleck, he's in Russia. It looks like he gets a new identity at some point of a Russian priest who looks like him. He's very well-bearded in the recent sort of wanted posters. Yeah, which you can find. And it also becomes clear as all of this kind of unravels, that it looks like he's been in bed with Russian intelligence for a number of years. He's visited Russia 60 times in the previous 10 years before he flees there using different documents and mysterious diplomatic passport, thought to have been recruited by Russian military intelligence, the GRU or

GRU to keep our millions. Yes, exactly. I mean, that's just slightly weird. Referred to around 2014. According to Der Spiegel, the German news magazine, that might have been after he was targeted by a Russian woman in a honey trap who becomes his girlfriend and then connects him to Russian intelligence. Bit unclear.

He turns the honey trap back around? Well, no, I think he is honey trapped. And then I think he just, he just goes along with it. He just goes along with it. I mean, it's hard to be sure. I don't know what you think, but it feels more like the Russians would have seen that this is a guy who's a businessman, who's sympathetic to them, who's working for a company which moves money around.

All that's kind of helpful. So you can imagine Russian intelligence would have gone, this guy could be useful. Let's put a woman close to him. Not to blackmail him, but just to kind of work on him and build that relationship. Almost like a handler in a way. Yeah. I think that's what it feels like. I mean, obviously, it's hard to know. And as a result, that starts this connection with Russian intelligence. And you know, he goes to Syria with the Russians. He seems to be kind of one of those people who's slightly obsessed with the world of espionage. But anyway, the interesting link to our Bulgarians seems to be through Rusev, the great Yarmouth hotel owner, Dr. Nefario. And again, the link seems to be back from wirecard days. According to the FT, Yamar Selectlec, the businessman, and Rusev had met in 2015 when they were introduced by a mutual friend in London. And it seems like that Rusev, remember

who is the engineer comms specialist, was helping Jan Marselec with secure communication. So with mobile phones that couldn't be hacked, or perhaps doing surveillance on other people, who knows? But that kind of makes sense, doesn't it? If you're a businessman who's in this murky world, you're looking for someone who can provide you with that kind of kit or specialty. And we know Rusev was running a business doing that. Marsalek, is he being tasked by the Russians? Or is it better to think of him as a really motivated volunteer who kind of looks out at Syria, looks at the UK, looks across the world and figures out where he can kind of make things happen.

Because it's interesting, it has a bit of a feel of these are people who, Marseillec and Rusev, who are kind of sympathetic to Russia and want to demonstrate their value, right, to Putin and the people around him. Yeah, that's right. Because I think Rusev is getting his instructions from Marsilek, we know from these messages. So Marsilek is the kind of intermediary with Russian intelligence, looks like the GRU and the FSB, the Russian Security Service. But it looks more like Marsilek is trying to make himself useful to Russian intelligence. He's almost like a kind of freelance operator in Moscow, trying to prove his value to the people who he's got contacts with by saying, hey, look, I can do this. I've got these people on the ground who can do this. And he's trying to make himself a player and valuable in Moscow by engaging Rusev in

turn to do this. And in turn, Rusev is getting paid and he's paying then the minions to actually carry it out. The gig economy has ruined everything, Gordon, including including proper, clear cut lines of control in a surveillance operation. I mean, it's like everyone's just kind of freelancing. The psychology of this is fascinating, right? Because even from some of the nicknames they give themselves,

you can see that these are people who are fascinated with the world of espionage and probably feel important being part of it too, right? So they're being paid and they get to feel cool at the same time and they get to freelance. It's the gig economy come to the world of the spy business. And so, Gordon, maybe there we should take a break and when we come back, we will see how this all comes crashing down for Jan Marsalek and his group of Bulgarian minions.

See you after the break. Well, welcome back. Our minions have hatched their nefarious plots and had all of their spy tech cataloged by the Metropolitan Police and they are arrested as we started these episodes Gordon in February of 2023. And I guess, I guess it seems given the volume of evidence, including all of those unencrypted messages, that it's a relatively clear-cut case in many ways. Is that right? Yeah, it is interesting because you've got five of them who arrested at the start on those raids

in February 2023. Famously, Zambazov in bed with Gabarov as well, rather than with his partner. But Ivanchev, he's arrested a bit later, we should say. He turns up at some of the addresses asking what's happened to people. People get suspicious about him. And initially, the group arrested are charged with ID fraud offences, because they've got fake IDs. And that's quite helpful while they build the case against them, because it's going to take a while to kind of understand what evidence they've got.

But three of them, including Rusev, the boss, plead guilty. And in a way, it's obvious, isn't it? Because if you're caught with a ton of spy gear, in your once hotel, and messages from a Russian handler, it's kind of hard to make a case. Your lawyer says plead guilty, and then maybe you get out on good behavior in a few years or something like that. But what's interesting is that another three, Ivanchev and the two women, Ivanova and Gabarova, are going to not plead guilty and they're going to go to trial.

And the crucial thing is they are going to argue they've been duped. So they're going to say not so much duped, but that they didn't know who they were working for. And the prosecution case is going to be not necessarily that they have to be pro-Putin or pro-Russia, but they are working to Russia's benefit and had kind of knowledge and intentions to help Russia. And they're going to base that on some of the communications, some of the gear, some of the facts of, you know, the kind of surveillance operations

they're doing. Their defense is fascinating because they're doing. Yeah, their defense is fascinating, because they're going to claim that Zambazov was basically manipulating them by telling them that they were secretly working for Interpol. Oh, interesting. Yeah. It's kind of interesting, because they claim that that was what they were told. And he had some kind of fake Interpol IDs and the like, and that when they were carrying out these secret spy operations or whatever, they thought they were doing it for Interpol rather than for Russia. Could that be true?

Interpol are like sharing information. I know, but I guess if you're not familiar with that world at all... Could you believe that? Yeah. Could you believe it? I don't know. Or could you maybe have some suspicions? But I guess the question would be, is there anything in the communications that directly connects from the standpoint of, let's say, Gabirova, the beautician, the work that she's doing to track Kristogorov with Russia? Yeah. But I think that's the point is that the fact that these were critics

of Russia and Putin who are being tracked and surveilled is one indication of that. And there was also some other information in there about them trying to get hold of equipment, and it was clear on behalf of Russia. So I think the point was they couldn't really be under any illusions that this was ultimately for Russia. And that was a lot of what it hinged on. I mean, Gabarova says she's manipulated by Zembazov. And she says, you remember in the previous episode, we talked about how he claimed he had brain cancer. And that was why he was trying to balance out his relationship with these two women and explain some of his absences. And Gabirova, who's our beautician, she of the Russian eyelashes act,

and she kind of gets suspicious at one point supposedly about about his brain cancer. And then he sends her images of himself, supposedly recovering in hospital from surgery. Now, I've got that image there. And to me, I don't know what you think of it. But he's clearly got toilet paper around his head. He's wrapped his head in toilet paper. That's exactly what it looks like. Because he's on, he's on, it looks like he's on a video call with her here, right? Yeah. And he doesn't look like he's in a hospital. And he just looks like he's lying down. Is he maybe out at the spy base in Norfolk, right? The sort of emerald of the British

Isles. Thank you to her again, to our sponsors at the Norfolk Tourism Board. But yeah, it looks like, it looks like toilet paper to me. Anyway, she claims she was kind of manipulated, and he was controlling her. But then it gets quite messy. But all three who didn't plead guilty are found guilty. And so in the end, all six get sentenced. There are some interesting things to reflect on. One of the unanswered questions from the trial is how they got onto this group in the first place. I would guess very deliberately not answered by our friends at the British security service or the Metropolitan Police, right? Or SIS.

I mean, when I've tried asking, I've not got any... You're not getting answers to that question? Yeah. When I've tried asking, I've not got any, I'm not getting anywhere on that. It would seem to me I'm just hazarding a guess here. I would guess it had to have been through Jan Marsalek. That communications, they got somewhere along the chain. His comms were intercepted or penetrated in Russia, I would think. And then you sort of unravel the group that way, because it doesn't seem like there would have been a lot of reason for the police

or the security service in the UK to be watching any of these people. Otherwise, right, it's the connection to Marsalek and Moscow that makes them radioactive. I'm just I'm hazarding a guess there without any insider information, but that seems like a reasonable hypothesis. Yeah. Or they had some kind of source or penetration in Moscow of the GRU or the FSB who were telling them, again, which would lead you from that end to get to the Bulgarians and the Minions,

rather than spotting the Minions doing stuff. I agree that that seems to make more sense. I would also think that there would have been reasons given for breaking up the group if it were a tradecraft issue that had been spotted, or a criminal issue that had been spotted in the UK by MI5 or the police, like I think that that would have been part of the evidence probably submitted at trial or would have come out because it'd be more open, whereas this feels like it's in the spookier realm of what's

actually going on in Russia sort of leads you here. Yeah, no, I think that makes sense. Yeah. So as we come to the end, I guess, I mean, a few questions come out of it. One of which is, why would Russia use these guys? Why use Dr. Nefario and the minions? I mean, lots of benefits, right? They're cheap. They're expendable, clearly very expendable. And they can provide real value, even if it's amateur hour a lot of the time. To me, the expendability part is critical.

For a few hundred thousand euro, you have a group of people you don't have to protect. You don't have to get into any kind of diplomatic incident over. These are not Russian intelligence officers who might need to be swapped back if they're caught doing something or whatever. These are people you can just cut loose and cut them some minor checks that in the grand scheme of things are nothing. And they might give you Intel on Ukrainian air defense systems, potentially. Yeah. So another reason I think is that it has got harder for Russia to use its regular spies in Europe, particularly in the last, I guess, since 2018. If you go back to the Salisbury poisons, the first time you start to get real pressure on Russian embassies in Britain, but also across Europe, in which Russian

diplomats, diplomats, but also spies are expelled in huge numbers. And that really accelerates after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. And you get, I think, 600 expulsions of Russian diplomats, who are basically spies from different European countries. So suddenly, you get, I think, 600 expulsions of Russian diplomats who are basically spies from different European countries. So suddenly, the Russians cannot carry out espionage in the same way from their embassies. They can no longer use them as platforms. They can no longer run agents out of them. They can no longer task people or do any of those things. them, they can no longer task people or do any of those things. So you've got a lot of pressure, I think, over this period on those regular Russian

spy networks in Europe, which might have been the people running this in the past. And then you get pressure on the so-called illegal networks, which are the kind of people under deeper cover, not under diplomatic or legal cover, but illegal cover. So these are people posing as businessmen or students. We've seen lots of those arrested as well, and picked up after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. So I think that what you see is Russia turning to people like these Bulgarians, you see them turning to proxies, and

criminals and others to do their dirty work. I'm of two minds on this, because I do think what you're saying is right, that particularly post-Kraine, it's a lot harder for the Russians. Let's take what happened when the GRU was surveilling Sergey Skripal in Salisbury. They used GRU officers to actually deliver the nerve agent to conduct the surveillance. they flew in and out of the UK. That's much harder to imagine now because of, I mean, in part because of groups like Bell and Cat and people like Kristokorosov who have exposed those kinds of operations,

but also because it's just a lot harder for Russians to operate in Western Europe since 2022. So I think that is very clearly part of this case. I mean, the other side of it though, is that from the standpoint of what kind of attributes do you want your unilateral surveillance network to have or group to have, this Bulgarian group, I think 10 years ago would have still been valuable to them because they can move around Western Europe.

They live in the UK. Maybe we don't blend in exactly, but they're not Russians being dispatched from Moscow. So this is exactly the kind of group that a spy agency would want to recruit and use because again, you don't want to be using Russian intelligence officers for a lot of this work. And I think that's true even 10 years ago. One thing that probably is new is that the leadership of it, the management of it is being done remotely by Jan Marsalek in Moscow because the Russians don't have the sort of espionage presence in the UK

that they would have 10 years ago. I'd imagine 10 years ago, if you're running these Bulgarians, you might have someone in the residence or in London, who is managing them overseeing them running them and then reporting it back to Moscow, whereas now you've got to do it remotely because you don't have the ability to really run it from the UK. So I think there's a bit here where it's like nothing

has changed. And there's another piece of it where groups like this are maybe even more important to the Russians because of how much pressure there has been. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that out of necessity, there's a looser relationship, isn't there? Because you can't run them directly on the ground. They're being run from Moscow, but through Maslach, who's a kind of cutout, it's a looser model than you might have seen in the past, more like a contractor relationship that we were talking about, the kind of gig economy thought. They're filling a gap in the market. Maslach is also trying to kind of work his contacts over there.

It's a much looser network. And I think we are seeing that more with Russia now, where it's also reaching out remotely over Telegram, this network, to criminals, to other people in Britain and saying, hey, go carry out this act of arsenal sabotage and we'll pay you some cryptocurrency to do it. And those people might say, oh, we didn't realize it was for the Russian state. So you get back to that question. But you can suddenly task people and pay them remotely to carry out acts of espionage and sabotage on that kind that gig economy remote model, a looser model than the formal intelligence relationship of the past. It made me think, as we were talking here about a lot of the recent spy cases involving the Iranians

running assets inside Israel, where a lot of these people are recruited totally remotely by the Iranian intelligence services or cutouts to essentially complete particular acts inside Israel. But it's all run remotely without these sort of street meetings or any of the kind of classic pictures you'd have of espionage. So it's not just happening in the Russian context either. I mean, there's another question here, which is, you know, we've been using minions references quite liberally, I would say, perhaps too liberally, throughout these two episodes. I mean, and I guess there's a question of whether these minions are sort of, are they clowns playing at spies or something much more dangerous?

It's a question you often get with these Russian spy cases, because sometimes you can play up the comedy value, the ineptitude. I mean, you've seen that with all kinds of the characters in lots of these operations. And that's definitely the case here. I mean, there is an element of absurdity, of black comedy, of the minions, of the weird relationships, of the slight grubby, slow horses aspect to this. And yet, I think it's easy to overstate that and lose sight of the fact that it still could have been dangerous. They're carrying out surveillance on people who were the targets for the Kremlin,

and who could have got killed based on the surveillance reports or kidnapped based on the surveillance reports supplied by this group, or Ukrainians who could have been killed because the air defences were taken out as a result of the work of this group. So you can be stupid, you can be amateur-hour in some of your activities, you can have all of those things, and yet you can still be dangerous. And I think that's one of the things that's, you know, sometimes a bit tricky to get your heads around with these groups. But I definitely think they were a serious spiring, a really serious spiring, even if they were also the minions. And I guess, though, maybe Gordon, before we go, we should mention that listeners should join us on Monday, when we will have a very special announcement. Top secret for the moment.

Top secret. Top secret for the moment. Top secret. Top secret for the moment. Highly classified. That's right. A highly classified announcement will be totally declassified on Monday. We're starting a new series on the subject of Edward Snowden. See you on Monday. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.