AI transcript
0:00:15 Hi, I’m Sam Jones, and I hope you don’t mind me dropping in to give you a quick preview
0:00:21 of my new podcast, Hot Money, Agent of Chaos. It all started in 2020, when my colleagues
0:00:26 at the Financial Times exposed the German company Wirecard as a huge fraud. But underneath
0:00:32 that I discovered another, more elusive tale. Jan Marsalek was more than just Europe’s biggest
0:00:39 financial con artist. He was someone who had other lives. And his shadow, it seemed to appear
0:00:45 in the most unexpected places. In the investigation into a deadly poisoning, in the wake of an
0:00:51 Austrian political scandal, in Libya’s refugee camps, with mercenaries in Syria, oligarchs
0:00:56 on the French Riviera. Bulgarian criminals in a dishevelled English seaside resort.
0:01:01 I’ve been pulling together all these threads to try and understand who Jan Marsalek was,
0:01:07 and what it is that connects them all. And I think I’ve got an explanation for you. It’s
0:01:13 a story that says as much about our own society as it does about the wildlife of one rogue individual.
0:01:20 It’s about power and corruption, and the secret front line of a huge geopolitical game
0:01:26 that affects us all. I hope you enjoy this preview, and if you do, find Hot Money,
0:01:29 Agent of Chaos, wherever you listen to your podcasts.
0:01:58 It’s a winter’s day in 2018. Paul Murphy is standing in front of the mirror of the gents’
0:02:01 lavatory at work. He’s changing for lunch.
0:02:05 I kind of stopped wearing ties, but I think I put a tie on for that occasion.
0:02:11 Paul is in his mid-fifties. He’s got a slightly grizzled look about him. You wouldn’t pick
0:02:14 him out in a crowd, but that’s an advantage in his line of work.
0:02:23 In his hands, Paul is holding a small silver disc about the size of a penny. He takes his shirt
0:02:30 off, grabs a piece of medical tape, and fixes this disc onto his shoulder, because this disc
0:02:38 is a tiny microphone. He slips his white shirt back on, puts a jacket on top, and with one last
0:02:45 glance in the mirror, he’s ready for lunch. Paul is the head of investigations at the Financial Times
0:02:54 in London. He takes a cab across town, to Mayfair, to a venue called 45 Park Lane.
0:03:01 It’s, you know, it’s one of those places that is priced to keep out ordinary people. You know,
0:03:09 it’s all glass windows and bling and mirrored interiors and very few customers. Very few.
0:03:11 It’s Dubai style, essentially.
0:03:18 As Paul walks in, he tries to keep his cool. Despite four decades in journalism, this is a
0:03:22 first for him. He’s never actually worn a wire himself.
0:03:27 It’s very, very nerve-wracking. You know, I’ve got a bug on me. You know, I didn’t want our
0:03:32 undercover team to get discovered. That would be hugely embarrassing. So I was, you know,
0:03:33 I was nervous.
0:03:38 The maitre d’ escorts Paul across the room, and there, rising from his chair, smiling
0:03:44 courteously and greeting Paul with a handshake, is the man he’s come to meet, Jan Marsalek.
0:03:50 Very slim, athletic build, razor-sharp blue suit.
0:03:56 Paul came here to set a trap, to get this successful businessman on tape.
0:04:01 But by the time they finish their meal, he wonders if he’s the one who has walked into
0:04:01 a trap.
0:04:09 If I’m honest, I felt a bit amateurish, you know. We were out of our depth. This guy was
0:04:19 very, very slick, controlled, careful, polished. And, you know, I’m not.
0:04:33 My name is Sam Jones, and I’m a journalist with the Financial Times. I’m a foreign correspondent
0:04:39 based in Central Europe. This lunch you’ve just heard about, it’s the unexpected beginning
0:04:46 of an investigation that has, in one way or another, preoccupied me for the past five years.
0:04:54 At the centre of it is the man in the sharp blue suit, Jan Marsalek. A man who, I discovered,
0:05:02 is so fascinated by risk and deceit that one identity, one life, wasn’t enough for him.
0:05:10 I find it’s often people like this, the most unusual people, who reveal universal truths,
0:05:16 the fact that we’re all inventors of our own personal narratives, how fictions can be stitched
0:05:18 together to create realities.
0:05:27 This tale begins in London and Munich, but leaps across the globe, from Libya to Austria,
0:05:32 from Bulgaria to Afghanistan, from the Côte d’Azur to Moscow.
0:05:40 Jan Marsalek’s life is a window into a hidden world of geopolitical power games, games which,
0:05:47 in ways big and small, govern our lives. Games which have never felt more relevant, or the
0:05:56 players of them, harder to fathom. This is a story about espionage, about Europe, about Russia,
0:06:04 and ultimately, America. From the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries, this is Hot Money,
0:06:10 Season 3, Agent of Chaos. Episode 1, The Bride.
0:06:28 Paul Murphy hired me to work for the FT 17 years ago. It’s been a long time since Paul’s
0:06:35 my actual boss, but he was, and still is, a mentor to me. All of my best habits in journalism,
0:06:41 and some of my worst ones, I’ve picked up from Paul. Pretty much since starting my career,
0:06:48 every couple of months or so, I end up at lunch with him, in Sweetings. It’s a noisy,
0:06:54 crowded fish restaurant, deep in the city, London’s financial district. It’s distinctly old school,
0:07:01 even a bowler hat wouldn’t look out of place. And coming here, it underscores lesson number one
0:07:03 in the Paul Murphy School of Journalism.
0:07:08 You have to get out of the bloody office. Get out of the bloody office. Young reporters in particular
0:07:14 think that you can do everything digitally. But actually, you get a lot more information
0:07:20 of somebody face to face. You have to win people’s trust. And one way of doing that is have lunch with
0:07:29 people. It’s a great social setting to develop, you know, a relationship with somebody who you need
0:07:35 them to trust you. I want to paint a bit of a picture for you about Paul, because it pays in
0:07:40 this story to try and get the measure of people’s character. Or at least, to try and understand the
0:07:46 version of themselves people present to the world, and why. Although Paul spends a lot of time at lunch,
0:07:52 he’s definitely not just another city soak. Most people tend to miss the little silver ring he’s
0:07:58 wearing, a skull designed by his daughter. People miss a lot about Paul, but that’s part of the trick.
0:08:05 He’s very good at being underestimated. And because of that, he’s also very good at getting people to
0:08:09 trust him, to talk to him, and to give him information.
0:08:16 To understand why I was drawn into this story, you need to know a bit about the reporting that was
0:08:23 dominating Paul’s life back in 2018. He and his star reporter, Dan McCrum, were neck deep investigating a
0:08:30 German company called Wirecard, a company that was run by the man in the razor-sharp blue suit,
0:08:37 the man who Paul would eventually meet for lunch in Mayfair, Jan Marsalek. Wirecard ran the financial
0:08:44 plumbing behind billions of online transactions. It was so successful at that point, it was even
0:08:51 secretly plotting a takeover of Germany’s biggest bank. So to the world, Wirecard was a booming digital
0:08:57 payments company. To Paul and his reporter, Dan, Wirecard was a huge fraud, and they were well on
0:09:07 the way to proving it. But it was no normal fraud. Because for months, Paul and Dan, they suspected
0:09:14 they’d been under intense surveillance, all directed by someone at Wirecard, from its base in southern
0:09:20 German. I mean, it’s kind of like, almost sounds silly to recount it. But, you know, we were paranoid
0:09:28 about being followed around London, we would get on and off tube trains quickly, just in case somebody
0:09:34 was getting on the same tube train as us. We would turn off our phones, so that our location couldn’t
0:09:41 be tracked. Dan had already had his emails hacked, and some of them leaked online. It was an attempt to
0:09:46 embarrass and discredit him. There had been a mounting and seemingly coordinated attack on his
0:09:51 reputation on social media. When Paul told me all of this over a series of lunches at Sweetings,
0:09:57 I guess he was doing so because he wanted to know if I had any contact, in private intelligence or even
0:10:04 in the actual intelligence services, people who might be able to help. Because the subject I really write
0:10:13 about, the subject that has become my specialism at the FT, is spying. Paul was probably also telling me
0:10:19 out of frustration, because back then he and Dan had hit a bit of a wall in their reporting. They’d
0:10:23 published all they could about Wirecard based on the evidence they had gathered so far, but they still
0:10:30 didn’t have a smoking gun. And Wirecard’s aggressive lawyers, Shillings, had meanwhile come down hard on
0:10:35 them. Dan had only just avoided a ruinous lawsuit. It wasn’t a great time.
0:10:44 It was this sense that, what have we got ourselves into? That was like a real low moment. Maybe I’ve
0:10:51 got myself into a bit too much hot water here. You do start to worry what you’ve sort of brought down
0:10:57 on your family. It was quite oppressive. There was this turning point for Dan. One of his sources rang
0:11:02 him up to tell him he’d been roughed up on the street by two thugs right outside his children’s
0:11:07 school. They demanded to know if this source had passed on confidential information about Wirecard.
0:11:13 Hearing this sent Dan into a bit of a tailspin, because suddenly he was worrying about the safety
0:11:20 of his own family. My first thing is I sort of go home and obsessively change every single one of my
0:11:29 passwords. Start checking all the security on my house. I mean, the worst moment is we had just moved
0:11:35 into this rented house. And I suddenly realized I haven’t checked the lock on this patio door at the
0:11:41 back of the house, which we’d never used. And it just slides straight open. Like our house had
0:11:46 essentially been unlocked for the last couple of months. And at that point, I really did start
0:11:53 freaking out about security, who might be after us. I mean, I basically became really paranoid.
0:11:58 It was right at the peak of this paranoia that something even stranger happened.
0:12:06 Something that led to that lunch at 45 Park Lane. Paul was talking to one of his oldest sources.
0:12:13 And we got onto the subject of Wirecard. Just a completely, you know, innocent, relaxed conversation.
0:12:21 And this guy just suddenly said, you know that they’ll pay you a lot of money to stop writing about
0:12:31 them. And I kind of laughed. And he stopped me and said, no, they will pay you $10 million to stop
0:12:36 writing about them. I don’t know if you work in the kind of job or live the kind of life where you’ve
0:12:43 ever been bribed. But even as a journalist for the FT, this doesn’t really happen, let alone for such a
0:12:51 ridiculous sum of money. I mean, for $10 million, what would you do? And as such, it takes Paul a while
0:12:57 to realise that this is a serious offer. How do you know this? He asks. Through my son, his source tells
0:13:02 him. He’s got to know someone at Wirecard pretty well. They’ve been out together a few times, carousing.
0:13:09 He’s called Jan Marsalek. And then Paul’s source, he says something which makes Paul clock that this
0:13:17 offer is real. Marsalek is paying this guy more than $200,000 just to convey the message. You should meet
0:13:24 him for lunch, he suggests. So what does Paul say? Tell me when and tell me where.
0:13:31 Paul has no intention of taking the bribe. But this backchannel offer, it seems to confirm everything
0:13:33 they suspect about Wirecard.
0:13:40 absolutely confirmed all our suspicions. Which were that the company is a criminal enterprise.
0:13:43 Absolutely. This was kind of tangible evidence.
0:13:50 All they need now is for Marsalek to offer the bribe himself and to get that on tape. It’s time for the FT to
0:13:52 mount its own surveillance operation.
0:14:00 So that day at 45 Park Lane, the formal introduction’s over, it’s time to order.
0:14:08 Steaks. The overpriced speciality of this place. Around £170 for a six-ounce filet mignon.
0:14:14 Right from the start, though, Paul begins to feel that Marsalek isn’t quite what he was expecting.
0:14:21 Paul is on edge, but he’s not alone. To his relief, it’s not long before he spots his undercover
0:14:28 support team. Three FT colleagues who pose as wealthy ladies catching up over lunch.
0:14:33 They’ve snagged a table just next to him, and they look pretty convincing.
0:14:37 One of the reporters places her handbag on the back of a chair.
0:14:43 Hidden inside, a camera films the lunch at an angle, catching Jan Marsalek in profile.
0:14:51 You can hear the tenor of his voice, but the background noise means it’s impossible
0:14:52 to make out his words.
0:14:59 To me, watching this footage back, it’s striking how animated he is.
0:15:03 He turns from side to side, addressing everyone at the table as he talks.
0:15:10 His face lights up. He’s sort of holding court, emphasising his words with expansive hand gestures.
0:15:12 He almost looks like a politician.
0:15:18 The longer the conversation goes on like this, the more clear it becomes to Paul that
0:15:20 Marsalek is the one in control.
0:15:27 This guy is expansive and engaging, charming, but not at all defensive.
0:15:32 There’s no trace of anger or guilt or care.
0:15:38 He gently protests about the FT’s unfair coverage of Wirecard, as if it’s been an inconvenience.
0:15:43 But his whole tone seems to be saying, let’s put this behind us.
0:15:49 As they settle into the meal, Paul nudges the conversation into more dubious terrain.
0:15:56 Eager to get something incriminating, even if it’s just a hint of something, on tape and on camera.
0:16:02 I certainly talked about the kind of aggression that the business had shown us.
0:16:06 And we also talked about whether journalists were corrupt.
0:16:12 And he absolutely assured me that he knew that journalists could be bought.
0:16:16 I remember saying, we don’t take bribes.
0:16:19 And I remember him very specifically saying, I know that, Paul.
0:16:20 I know you don’t.
0:16:23 I’ve seen evidence that you don’t take bribes.
0:16:27 And I thought, ah, you’ve seen my bank account.
0:16:34 I remember the kind of jolting that he was kind of like stating this so openly.
0:16:39 But the conversation continues in this vein, nothing concrete.
0:16:42 The killer offer of a bribe Paul had been hoping for.
0:16:49 Well, it’s clear that Marsalek is far too savvy an operator to make it here and now, at their first meeting.
0:16:57 I pretty quickly, you know, came to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to be offered a bribe in front of these people.
0:16:59 A bit of a damp squip, in a way.
0:17:00 Yes, it was.
0:17:05 So Paul is now left wondering, what does Marsalek want from him?
0:17:09 Why has this meeting happened if he’s not actually going to make him some kind of offer?
0:17:12 The lunch lasted about 90 minutes.
0:17:15 And at the end, Marsalek insisted on paying.
0:17:23 And pulled out a gold credit card, a novelty credit card of solid gold.
0:17:24 Was he a bit of a show-off?
0:17:26 Well, yes.
0:17:32 You know, we’re in one of the most expensive restaurants in London, eating kind of 200 quid steak.
0:17:38 And he was paying for the bill with a gold credit card.
0:17:39 So, yeah.
0:17:46 As Paul leaves the restaurant, he almost laughs at himself for having thought he’d be heading back with something explosive.
0:17:50 But he also realises that this experience actually hasn’t been a busted flush.
0:17:52 Far from it.
0:17:56 Meeting Jan Marsalek has only intrigued Paul more.
0:17:58 It’s put him into 3D.
0:18:02 There’s something about Marsalek he can’t quite put his finger on.
0:18:10 I felt I’d met somebody who was very controlled and confident, who was almost certainly corrupt.
0:18:13 I basically said, can we do that again?
0:18:17 And indeed, Paul does meet with him again.
0:18:21 That’s coming up after the break.
0:19:08 When Paul first started telling me about Wirecard, I think I treated it all as entertaining table talk.
0:19:15 Paul is a great teller of stories, and I always enjoyed hearing the gossip about what his investigations team was up to.
0:19:20 After he told me about meeting Marsalek, though, something began to needle at me.
0:19:24 Just a feeling about what kind of person Marsalek was.
0:19:26 A feeling I couldn’t pin down.
0:19:29 Until I heard about the second lunch.
0:19:38 One month after that lunch at Park Lane, Paul met Marsalek again, this time without undercover colleagues or secret cameras.
0:19:40 It was just the two of them.
0:19:44 They met at the Lanesborough, another high-end hotel in London.
0:19:47 We talked about geopolitics.
0:19:49 We talked about technology.
0:19:51 We talked about finance.
0:19:54 You know, we talked about the state of the world.
0:19:59 He had interesting opinions and information on all these things.
0:20:07 If I’m honest, at this stage, I’d become fascinated by this character because he seemed to know so many people.
0:20:14 And I kind of, you know, I was thinking, well, you know, he’s probably not going to offer me a bribe.
0:20:15 We’re not going to just catch him.
0:20:18 He’s not that stupid.
0:20:22 This guy is smart, and he knows people, and he has information.
0:20:27 At this point, did it occur to you that he’d charmed you in any way?
0:20:32 Yes, it did, but he was a charming man.
0:20:33 Did you like him?
0:20:35 Yeah.
0:20:36 Yes, I liked him.
0:20:43 If Wirecard, if you hadn’t have known it to be a fraud, do you think you would have sought to stay in touch with him?
0:20:45 Absolutely, absolutely.
0:20:51 I mean, in actual fact, you know, my thinking after that second lunch, I did.
0:20:55 I actually thought I’m going to, you know, develop this guy as a source.
0:21:01 What did you think he was hoping to get out of a relationship with you?
0:21:04 Actually, it was very clear.
0:21:07 We posed an existential risk to Wirecard.
0:21:14 He knew that by, you know, building a relationship directly with me,
0:21:21 that he could potentially stop us writing about them,
0:21:26 or at least he’d get the kind of intel in advance about what we were thinking.
0:21:35 So as Paul tells me about all of this, the feeling I get most is that a game is afoot.
0:21:40 And both Paul and Marsalek are enjoying playing it.
0:21:48 They’ve both established rapport, they’re both working to build trust, but they also test each other, push,
0:21:52 try to implicate each other in this polite conversation.
0:22:00 And all of this grips me because in it I see so much of the kind of psychology that I’ve spotted glimpses of covering intelligence and espionage.
0:22:04 I recognise the shape of this kind of interaction.
0:22:09 A certain amused, matter-of-fact detachment from things, despite the stakes.
0:22:11 Think about it.
0:22:17 Marsalek is lunching happily with a man who is trying to destroy the company he works for and put him in jail.
0:22:18 And Paul?
0:22:22 Well, in a funny way, Paul is being encouraged into a minor transgression.
0:22:27 Something that almost felt to me like a textbook trick from an intelligence recruitment manual.
0:22:30 An indiscretion that might later make you vulnerable.
0:22:36 Because Paul does all of this, works Marsalek,
0:22:41 behind the back of the lead reporter on the Wirecard project, Dan McCrum.
0:22:46 Why were you dealing with Marsalek and not Dan?
0:22:47 Dan and I are different characters.
0:22:52 Dan is a guy, you know, he’s tall and he has all his features in the right place.
0:22:55 And if your daughter brought him home as a boyfriend, he’d be really happy.
0:23:00 You know, he’s a good guy, he’s intelligent, he’s articulate, he’s well-educated.
0:23:06 But actually, actually, Dan is lethal.
0:23:08 Dan’s like a kind of smiling axe man.
0:23:09 He’s dangerous.
0:23:10 He’s forensic.
0:23:13 Yes, he’s absolute forensic and he won’t let it lie.
0:23:16 And, you know, I have a different style, all right?
0:23:20 I’m much softer and I, you know, chat people up and, you know,
0:23:23 I present myself as being very kind of clubbable.
0:23:26 You know, all journalists have different styles.
0:23:30 I mean, I think you’re probably more comfortable playing a role as well, no?
0:23:33 Possibly, yes.
0:23:38 Reading between the lines, I think probably a doubting part of him
0:23:41 was also wondering whether the Wirecard investigation was at a dead end.
0:23:45 The threat of a lawsuit from shillings meant their reporting had stalled.
0:23:50 And if that was the case, it might be worth Paul pursuing Marsalek as a source of his own.
0:23:52 Someone who could help him with other stories.
0:23:59 Then, around six months after that second meeting, Paul gets a call from an intermediary.
0:24:03 Marsalek conveys that he has something very interesting to offer.
0:24:05 Documents.
0:24:10 He hints at what they’re about and it sounds outlandish.
0:24:15 But it’s enough of a hint that Paul agrees to Marsalek’s suggestion
0:24:19 that he fly out to Munich, where Marsalek lives, in order to get them.
0:24:28 They meet at the Kiefer Schenker.
0:24:32 It’s a Munich institution, patrician, reassuringly expensive,
0:24:36 white tablecloths, panelled rooms, but warm and efficient service.
0:24:39 And it’s practically Marsalek’s house restaurant.
0:24:42 Jan was waiting for me outside.
0:24:42 We went in.
0:24:45 We had a little private room.
0:24:47 I remember having salmon with caviar.
0:24:52 And as they talked, Marsalek pushed a brown folder full of papers
0:24:53 across the table towards Paul.
0:24:57 But of course, he’s in a restaurant.
0:24:59 I couldn’t pull them out and start reading through them.
0:25:01 I just had to kind of politely say,
0:25:02 thank you very much, I’ll have a read of those.
0:25:07 And then we just had a kind of stilted, awkward lunch conversation.
0:25:09 We talked about his bad back.
0:25:13 If I’m honest, I was trying to get out of the lunch as quickly as possible
0:25:15 because I wanted to see what was in the folder.
0:25:17 They finished lunch.
0:25:19 Marsalek said he had to go back to the office.
0:25:24 The restaurant has lots of kind of separate bars and rooms.
0:25:29 And so I literally went down some stairs and found myself a little corner
0:25:32 and sat down and opened the folder.
0:25:40 These documents, they related to something that happened in the UK that spring.
0:25:44 Something awful, which had shocked the whole country.
0:25:48 Yesterday afternoon, passers-by noticed two people,
0:25:51 apparently unconscious, on a bench in Salisbury.
0:25:52 The area…
0:25:54 The Salisbury poisonings.
0:25:57 As a police presence remains here in the city whilst they investigate,
0:26:01 residents and visitors to the city have been reacting to the news.
0:26:08 Yeah, just completely surprised and shocked that something could happen like this in Salisbury.
0:26:15 An assassination attempt against a former spy using one of the deadliest nerve agents ever created,
0:26:19 a chemical that only a handful of government specialists knew about,
0:26:21 Novichok 234.
0:26:26 The spy was found half-dead alongside his unconscious daughter.
0:26:29 But thanks to some remarkable medical work, they both survived.
0:26:34 Another local resident, a mother of three, did not.
0:26:38 She died after coming into contact with the Novichok.
0:26:41 It had been hidden by the assassins in a perfume bottle.
0:26:48 The intended target was soon identified as a Russian intelligence officer who had fled to Britain in 2010.
0:26:55 Prime Minister Theresa May announced to a shocked parliament that Moscow was to blame.
0:27:02 The government has concluded that the two individuals named by the police and CPS
0:27:06 are officers from the Russian military intelligence service,
0:27:10 also known as the GRU.
0:27:17 The GRU, the main directorate, Russia’s fearsome military intelligence agency,
0:27:22 an organisation with goals that should have consigned it to Cold War history,
0:27:27 misinformation, civil disorder, violence, assassinations.
0:27:33 Under Vladimir Putin’s long watch, the GRU has quietly grown in power and influence.
0:27:38 In the weeks that followed the poisoning, Russia aggressively denied its involvement.
0:27:42 The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, meanwhile,
0:27:44 launched its own investigation.
0:27:48 Sending its experts to Salisbury to pour over the evidence.
0:27:56 They produced a highly classified dossier based on shared intelligence and chemical analysis from the site.
0:28:00 The dossier also included Russia’s own version of events.
0:28:04 These were the documents Paul now had in his hands.
0:28:12 It was fascinating to read all this kind of close detail, you know, the Russian version of the story.
0:28:20 And then the other very interesting part of the documents was the actual formula for Novichok.
0:28:24 The chemical diagram for the poison.
0:28:28 A technical outline for something that had been kept hidden from the world for decades.
0:28:31 A weapon of mass destruction.
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0:29:17 So what have we got?
0:29:21 Fart 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 sort of staple chiefs of paper.
0:29:27 Those documents that Marsalek handed over that day at the Kefershenka, Paul showed them to me.
0:29:33 And, well, they’re internal documents from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
0:29:36 And these have been sort of illegally photocopied, right?
0:29:37 Or so I think they’re photocopies anyway.
0:29:42 Yeah, they’re all kind of photocopies, except that one is a PowerPoint presentation.
0:29:44 They’ve all got barcodes on them.
0:29:48 And this sort of big stamped watermark, which says…
0:29:52 This printout may contain OPCW confidential information warning.
0:29:54 Yeah.
0:29:57 They’re all different copy numbers, though, as well, aren’t they?
0:29:58 Yeah, which is kind of curious.
0:30:07 The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is an international body based in The Hague.
0:30:11 Almost all of the world’s big military powers are signatories.
0:30:17 Its job is to police and monitor weapons like Novichok, to ensure they are never, ever used.
0:30:24 What was going through your head when you kind of first pulled this out of the manila envelope that they were all in?
0:30:27 Well, I was looking for a story.
0:30:34 You know, the Salisbury poisoning had been headline news for weeks on end.
0:30:43 Suddenly, I had, you know, what clearly were kind of classified documents pertaining specifically to that event.
0:30:45 There had to be a story in it.
0:30:46 You know, that’s what I was after.
0:31:00 And I was struck at how detailed and careful and yet completely fanciful the Russian version of events was.
0:31:06 In the documents, the Russians made the case that the British had manufactured Novichok.
0:31:12 Because Salisbury is just down the road from Porton Down, a highly secure military research base.
0:31:20 And the Russians, they argued that the British government had somehow leaked the Novichok from its own chemical research lab.
0:31:24 You know, I asked him, you know, point blank, where did he get this information?
0:31:25 What did he say?
0:31:26 He said he got it from a friend.
0:31:34 And he did actually say that, you know, if I wanted further information, I should try him in future.
0:31:39 That I’d be quite surprised at the sort of information he could access.
0:31:50 So this was sort of like a little bit of an opening, kind of showing his wares, you know, that if you wanted to keep him on side, then he could push other material your way.
0:31:51 Yeah, absolutely that.
0:31:56 He was basically saying, look, I have friends in interesting places.
0:31:58 I can help you in the future.
0:32:02 We were building a relationship on both sides.
0:32:12 While all of this unfolded, Dan McCrum, the lead reporter on the Wirecard investigation, hadn’t been sitting still.
0:32:16 In fact, he’d just found his very own treasure trove of documents.
0:32:28 And these documents, they would change everything because they finally gave Dan the ammunition he needed to prove that Wirecard was a fraud and that Marsalek was at the centre of it.
0:32:32 So when Paul got back to London and Dan told him all of this,
0:32:37 Paul knew it was time to go back on the offensive against Wirecard directly.
0:32:46 And also, therefore, that it was time to fess up to Dan and to tell him he’d been secretly lunching with Marsalek over the past few months.
0:32:57 Paul, you know, he’d gone to meet Marsalek for lunch and he was kind of cultivating this parallel kind of, you know, relationship with Marsalek.
0:33:00 When did you find out about that and what was your first thought?
0:33:01 Oh, man.
0:33:08 There are moments in life when you are taken by surprise.
0:33:19 I basically think he hadn’t wanted to, like, blow my mind whilst I was focused on getting the story because the important thing was to get the story out.
0:33:27 But it had reached the point where it was sort of becoming embarrassing that he hadn’t mentioned that he had quietly been dining with Jan Marsalek.
0:33:29 I’m like, sorry, I’m like, sorry, what?
0:33:38 But then he goes, he’s been flashing around top secret documents with a recipe for Novichok on them.
0:33:44 I think my reaction was if he had just tried to tell me that Marsalek had faked the moon landings.
0:33:57 It was so completely out of left field that you’re like, sorry, what did you just say?
0:34:09 To be clear, we had no evidence that Marsalek actually had anything to do with carrying out the poisonings.
0:34:13 But the fact that he even had these documents was a bombshell.
0:34:20 Not only because the documents made it clear that Marsalek was entangled with something besides just a huge corporate fraud,
0:34:25 but also because Marsalek had effectively chosen to disclose this.
0:34:28 Marsalek pulled the spotlight onto himself.
0:34:31 And it made us realise how little we knew about him at all.
0:34:39 At that point, we just kind of had this sense that Marsalek was this kind of man of action
0:34:44 and was mixed up somehow in Viennese politics.
0:34:49 Wachard’s aggressive surveillance of Paul and Dan intensified.
0:34:53 And they managed to trace it back to a private security company in Vienna,
0:34:57 the capital of Austria and Marsalek’s home city.
0:35:01 Paul and Dan were now going to spend the next few months battling to prove the fraud
0:35:04 with the new documents Dan had received.
0:35:05 But me?
0:35:10 I was about to start a foreign posting in Switzerland and in Austria.
0:35:13 If I was going to be on the ground, Paul thought,
0:35:16 then I could surely make some inquiries.
0:35:23 We already knew that there was a big Vienna angle to all this.
0:35:24 We just didn’t know what the angle was.
0:35:27 We just didn’t know which doors you had to knock on.
0:35:31 We didn’t know who you needed to get to.
0:35:32 Yeah, well, it worked.
0:35:34 I remember thinking you were mad.
0:35:38 I just thought, OK, all right, I’m just going to go to Austria
0:35:41 and start talking to people about Marsalek.
0:35:42 But, you know, you were right.
0:35:52 Sometimes it’s the smallest, most unpromising or unexpected little thread that you pull on that suddenly unravels something.
0:36:00 Sometimes that thread is just an intuition, a feeling about someone, a sense that there’s definitely something more here I don’t know about,
0:36:02 but that I recognise the shadow of.
0:36:12 As it turned out, this particular trace, well, it would slowly unravel into a story that wasn’t just the sordid tale of one well-connected fraudster,
0:36:18 but instead the tale of one of the biggest spy scandals to have hit Europe since the Cold War.
0:36:27 To this day, I remember that first note coming back from you, just saying that you needed a secure channel to communicate.
0:36:34 The detail you put in that first note was just mind-boggling, absolutely shocking.
0:36:37 It was like a whole world just opened up.
0:36:42 You know, this was no longer just about some weird German corporate.
0:36:50 There was this kind of huge geopolitical kind of side to the story that was only just coming into view.
0:36:57 Maybe you’ve felt in recent years that the world is a less certain place.
0:37:03 That from the background, there are threats or worries you’d never had to think about before that are suddenly present.
0:37:07 Wars that look like they might tip out of control.
0:37:10 Radical politicians tearing at the threads of civil society.
0:37:13 Lies turned into truth by money.
0:37:16 Well, this story is, in some senses, an accounting of that.
0:37:24 A story that can sometimes make you realise how tissue-thin the idea of a stable, law-abiding society can be.
0:37:28 One that’s governed by economic, political and moral rules we’ve all agreed on.
0:37:32 It’s a story about what kind of people get drawn into the world on the other side of that.
0:37:34 And what kind of world that is.
0:37:43 A space carved out by crime and corruption, where money and power are unchecked by laws, or borders, or markets.
0:37:47 That kind of world might sound terrifying.
0:37:50 But to some people, it’s irresistible.
0:37:53 To some people, it’s not an alternative world at all.
0:37:55 It’s the real world.
0:38:01 Coming up this season on Hot Money.
0:38:03 I know politics is corrupt.
0:38:04 I know everything.
0:38:04 I know that.
0:38:05 I know that.
0:38:06 I believe to know that.
0:38:07 But this is too much.
0:38:12 I thought, I hope that he will talk to you and you will be able to investigate on it.
0:38:17 And perhaps misdeeds and misbehaviour is stopped.
0:38:19 Very fast, actually.
0:38:22 He started then talking about his experience in Syria.
0:38:29 He definitely has a view that he’s operating with complete freedom to do whatever he likes.
0:38:32 I don’t know if they followed me to my home.
0:38:34 The decision was very simple.
0:38:38 It was a choice between being killed or in prison.
0:38:42 And the other option was just to try to get real freedom.
0:38:45 How much of it was an act?
0:38:46 How much was genius?
0:38:47 How much was learned?
0:38:48 How much was instinctive?
0:38:54 I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all?
0:39:03 Hot Money is a production of the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries.
0:39:07 It was written and reported by me, Sam Jones.
0:39:11 The senior producer and co-writer is Peggy Sutton.
0:39:13 Our producer is Izzy Carter.
0:39:15 Our researcher is Maureen Saint.
0:39:18 Our show is edited by Karen Shakurji.
0:39:21 Fact-checking by Keira Levine.
0:39:26 Sound design and mastering by Jake Gorski and Marcelo de Oliveira.
0:39:29 With additional sound design by Izzy Carter.
0:39:35 Original music from Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphonette.
0:39:38 Our show art is by Sean Carney.
0:39:44 Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley, Amy Gaines McQuaid and Matthew Garrahan.
0:39:47 Additional editing by Paul Murphy.
0:39:55 Special thanks to Rula Kalaf, Dan McCrum, Laura Clark, Alistair Mackey, Manuele Zaragoza,
0:40:02 Nigel Hansen, Vicky Merrick, Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Jake Flanagan, Jacob Goldstein,
0:40:05 Sarah Nix and Greta Cohn.
0:40:06 I’m Sam Jones.
0:40:19 This is an iHeart Podcast.
0:00:21 of my new podcast, Hot Money, Agent of Chaos. It all started in 2020, when my colleagues
0:00:26 at the Financial Times exposed the German company Wirecard as a huge fraud. But underneath
0:00:32 that I discovered another, more elusive tale. Jan Marsalek was more than just Europe’s biggest
0:00:39 financial con artist. He was someone who had other lives. And his shadow, it seemed to appear
0:00:45 in the most unexpected places. In the investigation into a deadly poisoning, in the wake of an
0:00:51 Austrian political scandal, in Libya’s refugee camps, with mercenaries in Syria, oligarchs
0:00:56 on the French Riviera. Bulgarian criminals in a dishevelled English seaside resort.
0:01:01 I’ve been pulling together all these threads to try and understand who Jan Marsalek was,
0:01:07 and what it is that connects them all. And I think I’ve got an explanation for you. It’s
0:01:13 a story that says as much about our own society as it does about the wildlife of one rogue individual.
0:01:20 It’s about power and corruption, and the secret front line of a huge geopolitical game
0:01:26 that affects us all. I hope you enjoy this preview, and if you do, find Hot Money,
0:01:29 Agent of Chaos, wherever you listen to your podcasts.
0:01:58 It’s a winter’s day in 2018. Paul Murphy is standing in front of the mirror of the gents’
0:02:01 lavatory at work. He’s changing for lunch.
0:02:05 I kind of stopped wearing ties, but I think I put a tie on for that occasion.
0:02:11 Paul is in his mid-fifties. He’s got a slightly grizzled look about him. You wouldn’t pick
0:02:14 him out in a crowd, but that’s an advantage in his line of work.
0:02:23 In his hands, Paul is holding a small silver disc about the size of a penny. He takes his shirt
0:02:30 off, grabs a piece of medical tape, and fixes this disc onto his shoulder, because this disc
0:02:38 is a tiny microphone. He slips his white shirt back on, puts a jacket on top, and with one last
0:02:45 glance in the mirror, he’s ready for lunch. Paul is the head of investigations at the Financial Times
0:02:54 in London. He takes a cab across town, to Mayfair, to a venue called 45 Park Lane.
0:03:01 It’s, you know, it’s one of those places that is priced to keep out ordinary people. You know,
0:03:09 it’s all glass windows and bling and mirrored interiors and very few customers. Very few.
0:03:11 It’s Dubai style, essentially.
0:03:18 As Paul walks in, he tries to keep his cool. Despite four decades in journalism, this is a
0:03:22 first for him. He’s never actually worn a wire himself.
0:03:27 It’s very, very nerve-wracking. You know, I’ve got a bug on me. You know, I didn’t want our
0:03:32 undercover team to get discovered. That would be hugely embarrassing. So I was, you know,
0:03:33 I was nervous.
0:03:38 The maitre d’ escorts Paul across the room, and there, rising from his chair, smiling
0:03:44 courteously and greeting Paul with a handshake, is the man he’s come to meet, Jan Marsalek.
0:03:50 Very slim, athletic build, razor-sharp blue suit.
0:03:56 Paul came here to set a trap, to get this successful businessman on tape.
0:04:01 But by the time they finish their meal, he wonders if he’s the one who has walked into
0:04:01 a trap.
0:04:09 If I’m honest, I felt a bit amateurish, you know. We were out of our depth. This guy was
0:04:19 very, very slick, controlled, careful, polished. And, you know, I’m not.
0:04:33 My name is Sam Jones, and I’m a journalist with the Financial Times. I’m a foreign correspondent
0:04:39 based in Central Europe. This lunch you’ve just heard about, it’s the unexpected beginning
0:04:46 of an investigation that has, in one way or another, preoccupied me for the past five years.
0:04:54 At the centre of it is the man in the sharp blue suit, Jan Marsalek. A man who, I discovered,
0:05:02 is so fascinated by risk and deceit that one identity, one life, wasn’t enough for him.
0:05:10 I find it’s often people like this, the most unusual people, who reveal universal truths,
0:05:16 the fact that we’re all inventors of our own personal narratives, how fictions can be stitched
0:05:18 together to create realities.
0:05:27 This tale begins in London and Munich, but leaps across the globe, from Libya to Austria,
0:05:32 from Bulgaria to Afghanistan, from the Côte d’Azur to Moscow.
0:05:40 Jan Marsalek’s life is a window into a hidden world of geopolitical power games, games which,
0:05:47 in ways big and small, govern our lives. Games which have never felt more relevant, or the
0:05:56 players of them, harder to fathom. This is a story about espionage, about Europe, about Russia,
0:06:04 and ultimately, America. From the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries, this is Hot Money,
0:06:10 Season 3, Agent of Chaos. Episode 1, The Bride.
0:06:28 Paul Murphy hired me to work for the FT 17 years ago. It’s been a long time since Paul’s
0:06:35 my actual boss, but he was, and still is, a mentor to me. All of my best habits in journalism,
0:06:41 and some of my worst ones, I’ve picked up from Paul. Pretty much since starting my career,
0:06:48 every couple of months or so, I end up at lunch with him, in Sweetings. It’s a noisy,
0:06:54 crowded fish restaurant, deep in the city, London’s financial district. It’s distinctly old school,
0:07:01 even a bowler hat wouldn’t look out of place. And coming here, it underscores lesson number one
0:07:03 in the Paul Murphy School of Journalism.
0:07:08 You have to get out of the bloody office. Get out of the bloody office. Young reporters in particular
0:07:14 think that you can do everything digitally. But actually, you get a lot more information
0:07:20 of somebody face to face. You have to win people’s trust. And one way of doing that is have lunch with
0:07:29 people. It’s a great social setting to develop, you know, a relationship with somebody who you need
0:07:35 them to trust you. I want to paint a bit of a picture for you about Paul, because it pays in
0:07:40 this story to try and get the measure of people’s character. Or at least, to try and understand the
0:07:46 version of themselves people present to the world, and why. Although Paul spends a lot of time at lunch,
0:07:52 he’s definitely not just another city soak. Most people tend to miss the little silver ring he’s
0:07:58 wearing, a skull designed by his daughter. People miss a lot about Paul, but that’s part of the trick.
0:08:05 He’s very good at being underestimated. And because of that, he’s also very good at getting people to
0:08:09 trust him, to talk to him, and to give him information.
0:08:16 To understand why I was drawn into this story, you need to know a bit about the reporting that was
0:08:23 dominating Paul’s life back in 2018. He and his star reporter, Dan McCrum, were neck deep investigating a
0:08:30 German company called Wirecard, a company that was run by the man in the razor-sharp blue suit,
0:08:37 the man who Paul would eventually meet for lunch in Mayfair, Jan Marsalek. Wirecard ran the financial
0:08:44 plumbing behind billions of online transactions. It was so successful at that point, it was even
0:08:51 secretly plotting a takeover of Germany’s biggest bank. So to the world, Wirecard was a booming digital
0:08:57 payments company. To Paul and his reporter, Dan, Wirecard was a huge fraud, and they were well on
0:09:07 the way to proving it. But it was no normal fraud. Because for months, Paul and Dan, they suspected
0:09:14 they’d been under intense surveillance, all directed by someone at Wirecard, from its base in southern
0:09:20 German. I mean, it’s kind of like, almost sounds silly to recount it. But, you know, we were paranoid
0:09:28 about being followed around London, we would get on and off tube trains quickly, just in case somebody
0:09:34 was getting on the same tube train as us. We would turn off our phones, so that our location couldn’t
0:09:41 be tracked. Dan had already had his emails hacked, and some of them leaked online. It was an attempt to
0:09:46 embarrass and discredit him. There had been a mounting and seemingly coordinated attack on his
0:09:51 reputation on social media. When Paul told me all of this over a series of lunches at Sweetings,
0:09:57 I guess he was doing so because he wanted to know if I had any contact, in private intelligence or even
0:10:04 in the actual intelligence services, people who might be able to help. Because the subject I really write
0:10:13 about, the subject that has become my specialism at the FT, is spying. Paul was probably also telling me
0:10:19 out of frustration, because back then he and Dan had hit a bit of a wall in their reporting. They’d
0:10:23 published all they could about Wirecard based on the evidence they had gathered so far, but they still
0:10:30 didn’t have a smoking gun. And Wirecard’s aggressive lawyers, Shillings, had meanwhile come down hard on
0:10:35 them. Dan had only just avoided a ruinous lawsuit. It wasn’t a great time.
0:10:44 It was this sense that, what have we got ourselves into? That was like a real low moment. Maybe I’ve
0:10:51 got myself into a bit too much hot water here. You do start to worry what you’ve sort of brought down
0:10:57 on your family. It was quite oppressive. There was this turning point for Dan. One of his sources rang
0:11:02 him up to tell him he’d been roughed up on the street by two thugs right outside his children’s
0:11:07 school. They demanded to know if this source had passed on confidential information about Wirecard.
0:11:13 Hearing this sent Dan into a bit of a tailspin, because suddenly he was worrying about the safety
0:11:20 of his own family. My first thing is I sort of go home and obsessively change every single one of my
0:11:29 passwords. Start checking all the security on my house. I mean, the worst moment is we had just moved
0:11:35 into this rented house. And I suddenly realized I haven’t checked the lock on this patio door at the
0:11:41 back of the house, which we’d never used. And it just slides straight open. Like our house had
0:11:46 essentially been unlocked for the last couple of months. And at that point, I really did start
0:11:53 freaking out about security, who might be after us. I mean, I basically became really paranoid.
0:11:58 It was right at the peak of this paranoia that something even stranger happened.
0:12:06 Something that led to that lunch at 45 Park Lane. Paul was talking to one of his oldest sources.
0:12:13 And we got onto the subject of Wirecard. Just a completely, you know, innocent, relaxed conversation.
0:12:21 And this guy just suddenly said, you know that they’ll pay you a lot of money to stop writing about
0:12:31 them. And I kind of laughed. And he stopped me and said, no, they will pay you $10 million to stop
0:12:36 writing about them. I don’t know if you work in the kind of job or live the kind of life where you’ve
0:12:43 ever been bribed. But even as a journalist for the FT, this doesn’t really happen, let alone for such a
0:12:51 ridiculous sum of money. I mean, for $10 million, what would you do? And as such, it takes Paul a while
0:12:57 to realise that this is a serious offer. How do you know this? He asks. Through my son, his source tells
0:13:02 him. He’s got to know someone at Wirecard pretty well. They’ve been out together a few times, carousing.
0:13:09 He’s called Jan Marsalek. And then Paul’s source, he says something which makes Paul clock that this
0:13:17 offer is real. Marsalek is paying this guy more than $200,000 just to convey the message. You should meet
0:13:24 him for lunch, he suggests. So what does Paul say? Tell me when and tell me where.
0:13:31 Paul has no intention of taking the bribe. But this backchannel offer, it seems to confirm everything
0:13:33 they suspect about Wirecard.
0:13:40 absolutely confirmed all our suspicions. Which were that the company is a criminal enterprise.
0:13:43 Absolutely. This was kind of tangible evidence.
0:13:50 All they need now is for Marsalek to offer the bribe himself and to get that on tape. It’s time for the FT to
0:13:52 mount its own surveillance operation.
0:14:00 So that day at 45 Park Lane, the formal introduction’s over, it’s time to order.
0:14:08 Steaks. The overpriced speciality of this place. Around £170 for a six-ounce filet mignon.
0:14:14 Right from the start, though, Paul begins to feel that Marsalek isn’t quite what he was expecting.
0:14:21 Paul is on edge, but he’s not alone. To his relief, it’s not long before he spots his undercover
0:14:28 support team. Three FT colleagues who pose as wealthy ladies catching up over lunch.
0:14:33 They’ve snagged a table just next to him, and they look pretty convincing.
0:14:37 One of the reporters places her handbag on the back of a chair.
0:14:43 Hidden inside, a camera films the lunch at an angle, catching Jan Marsalek in profile.
0:14:51 You can hear the tenor of his voice, but the background noise means it’s impossible
0:14:52 to make out his words.
0:14:59 To me, watching this footage back, it’s striking how animated he is.
0:15:03 He turns from side to side, addressing everyone at the table as he talks.
0:15:10 His face lights up. He’s sort of holding court, emphasising his words with expansive hand gestures.
0:15:12 He almost looks like a politician.
0:15:18 The longer the conversation goes on like this, the more clear it becomes to Paul that
0:15:20 Marsalek is the one in control.
0:15:27 This guy is expansive and engaging, charming, but not at all defensive.
0:15:32 There’s no trace of anger or guilt or care.
0:15:38 He gently protests about the FT’s unfair coverage of Wirecard, as if it’s been an inconvenience.
0:15:43 But his whole tone seems to be saying, let’s put this behind us.
0:15:49 As they settle into the meal, Paul nudges the conversation into more dubious terrain.
0:15:56 Eager to get something incriminating, even if it’s just a hint of something, on tape and on camera.
0:16:02 I certainly talked about the kind of aggression that the business had shown us.
0:16:06 And we also talked about whether journalists were corrupt.
0:16:12 And he absolutely assured me that he knew that journalists could be bought.
0:16:16 I remember saying, we don’t take bribes.
0:16:19 And I remember him very specifically saying, I know that, Paul.
0:16:20 I know you don’t.
0:16:23 I’ve seen evidence that you don’t take bribes.
0:16:27 And I thought, ah, you’ve seen my bank account.
0:16:34 I remember the kind of jolting that he was kind of like stating this so openly.
0:16:39 But the conversation continues in this vein, nothing concrete.
0:16:42 The killer offer of a bribe Paul had been hoping for.
0:16:49 Well, it’s clear that Marsalek is far too savvy an operator to make it here and now, at their first meeting.
0:16:57 I pretty quickly, you know, came to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to be offered a bribe in front of these people.
0:16:59 A bit of a damp squip, in a way.
0:17:00 Yes, it was.
0:17:05 So Paul is now left wondering, what does Marsalek want from him?
0:17:09 Why has this meeting happened if he’s not actually going to make him some kind of offer?
0:17:12 The lunch lasted about 90 minutes.
0:17:15 And at the end, Marsalek insisted on paying.
0:17:23 And pulled out a gold credit card, a novelty credit card of solid gold.
0:17:24 Was he a bit of a show-off?
0:17:26 Well, yes.
0:17:32 You know, we’re in one of the most expensive restaurants in London, eating kind of 200 quid steak.
0:17:38 And he was paying for the bill with a gold credit card.
0:17:39 So, yeah.
0:17:46 As Paul leaves the restaurant, he almost laughs at himself for having thought he’d be heading back with something explosive.
0:17:50 But he also realises that this experience actually hasn’t been a busted flush.
0:17:52 Far from it.
0:17:56 Meeting Jan Marsalek has only intrigued Paul more.
0:17:58 It’s put him into 3D.
0:18:02 There’s something about Marsalek he can’t quite put his finger on.
0:18:10 I felt I’d met somebody who was very controlled and confident, who was almost certainly corrupt.
0:18:13 I basically said, can we do that again?
0:18:17 And indeed, Paul does meet with him again.
0:18:21 That’s coming up after the break.
0:19:08 When Paul first started telling me about Wirecard, I think I treated it all as entertaining table talk.
0:19:15 Paul is a great teller of stories, and I always enjoyed hearing the gossip about what his investigations team was up to.
0:19:20 After he told me about meeting Marsalek, though, something began to needle at me.
0:19:24 Just a feeling about what kind of person Marsalek was.
0:19:26 A feeling I couldn’t pin down.
0:19:29 Until I heard about the second lunch.
0:19:38 One month after that lunch at Park Lane, Paul met Marsalek again, this time without undercover colleagues or secret cameras.
0:19:40 It was just the two of them.
0:19:44 They met at the Lanesborough, another high-end hotel in London.
0:19:47 We talked about geopolitics.
0:19:49 We talked about technology.
0:19:51 We talked about finance.
0:19:54 You know, we talked about the state of the world.
0:19:59 He had interesting opinions and information on all these things.
0:20:07 If I’m honest, at this stage, I’d become fascinated by this character because he seemed to know so many people.
0:20:14 And I kind of, you know, I was thinking, well, you know, he’s probably not going to offer me a bribe.
0:20:15 We’re not going to just catch him.
0:20:18 He’s not that stupid.
0:20:22 This guy is smart, and he knows people, and he has information.
0:20:27 At this point, did it occur to you that he’d charmed you in any way?
0:20:32 Yes, it did, but he was a charming man.
0:20:33 Did you like him?
0:20:35 Yeah.
0:20:36 Yes, I liked him.
0:20:43 If Wirecard, if you hadn’t have known it to be a fraud, do you think you would have sought to stay in touch with him?
0:20:45 Absolutely, absolutely.
0:20:51 I mean, in actual fact, you know, my thinking after that second lunch, I did.
0:20:55 I actually thought I’m going to, you know, develop this guy as a source.
0:21:01 What did you think he was hoping to get out of a relationship with you?
0:21:04 Actually, it was very clear.
0:21:07 We posed an existential risk to Wirecard.
0:21:14 He knew that by, you know, building a relationship directly with me,
0:21:21 that he could potentially stop us writing about them,
0:21:26 or at least he’d get the kind of intel in advance about what we were thinking.
0:21:35 So as Paul tells me about all of this, the feeling I get most is that a game is afoot.
0:21:40 And both Paul and Marsalek are enjoying playing it.
0:21:48 They’ve both established rapport, they’re both working to build trust, but they also test each other, push,
0:21:52 try to implicate each other in this polite conversation.
0:22:00 And all of this grips me because in it I see so much of the kind of psychology that I’ve spotted glimpses of covering intelligence and espionage.
0:22:04 I recognise the shape of this kind of interaction.
0:22:09 A certain amused, matter-of-fact detachment from things, despite the stakes.
0:22:11 Think about it.
0:22:17 Marsalek is lunching happily with a man who is trying to destroy the company he works for and put him in jail.
0:22:18 And Paul?
0:22:22 Well, in a funny way, Paul is being encouraged into a minor transgression.
0:22:27 Something that almost felt to me like a textbook trick from an intelligence recruitment manual.
0:22:30 An indiscretion that might later make you vulnerable.
0:22:36 Because Paul does all of this, works Marsalek,
0:22:41 behind the back of the lead reporter on the Wirecard project, Dan McCrum.
0:22:46 Why were you dealing with Marsalek and not Dan?
0:22:47 Dan and I are different characters.
0:22:52 Dan is a guy, you know, he’s tall and he has all his features in the right place.
0:22:55 And if your daughter brought him home as a boyfriend, he’d be really happy.
0:23:00 You know, he’s a good guy, he’s intelligent, he’s articulate, he’s well-educated.
0:23:06 But actually, actually, Dan is lethal.
0:23:08 Dan’s like a kind of smiling axe man.
0:23:09 He’s dangerous.
0:23:10 He’s forensic.
0:23:13 Yes, he’s absolute forensic and he won’t let it lie.
0:23:16 And, you know, I have a different style, all right?
0:23:20 I’m much softer and I, you know, chat people up and, you know,
0:23:23 I present myself as being very kind of clubbable.
0:23:26 You know, all journalists have different styles.
0:23:30 I mean, I think you’re probably more comfortable playing a role as well, no?
0:23:33 Possibly, yes.
0:23:38 Reading between the lines, I think probably a doubting part of him
0:23:41 was also wondering whether the Wirecard investigation was at a dead end.
0:23:45 The threat of a lawsuit from shillings meant their reporting had stalled.
0:23:50 And if that was the case, it might be worth Paul pursuing Marsalek as a source of his own.
0:23:52 Someone who could help him with other stories.
0:23:59 Then, around six months after that second meeting, Paul gets a call from an intermediary.
0:24:03 Marsalek conveys that he has something very interesting to offer.
0:24:05 Documents.
0:24:10 He hints at what they’re about and it sounds outlandish.
0:24:15 But it’s enough of a hint that Paul agrees to Marsalek’s suggestion
0:24:19 that he fly out to Munich, where Marsalek lives, in order to get them.
0:24:28 They meet at the Kiefer Schenker.
0:24:32 It’s a Munich institution, patrician, reassuringly expensive,
0:24:36 white tablecloths, panelled rooms, but warm and efficient service.
0:24:39 And it’s practically Marsalek’s house restaurant.
0:24:42 Jan was waiting for me outside.
0:24:42 We went in.
0:24:45 We had a little private room.
0:24:47 I remember having salmon with caviar.
0:24:52 And as they talked, Marsalek pushed a brown folder full of papers
0:24:53 across the table towards Paul.
0:24:57 But of course, he’s in a restaurant.
0:24:59 I couldn’t pull them out and start reading through them.
0:25:01 I just had to kind of politely say,
0:25:02 thank you very much, I’ll have a read of those.
0:25:07 And then we just had a kind of stilted, awkward lunch conversation.
0:25:09 We talked about his bad back.
0:25:13 If I’m honest, I was trying to get out of the lunch as quickly as possible
0:25:15 because I wanted to see what was in the folder.
0:25:17 They finished lunch.
0:25:19 Marsalek said he had to go back to the office.
0:25:24 The restaurant has lots of kind of separate bars and rooms.
0:25:29 And so I literally went down some stairs and found myself a little corner
0:25:32 and sat down and opened the folder.
0:25:40 These documents, they related to something that happened in the UK that spring.
0:25:44 Something awful, which had shocked the whole country.
0:25:48 Yesterday afternoon, passers-by noticed two people,
0:25:51 apparently unconscious, on a bench in Salisbury.
0:25:52 The area…
0:25:54 The Salisbury poisonings.
0:25:57 As a police presence remains here in the city whilst they investigate,
0:26:01 residents and visitors to the city have been reacting to the news.
0:26:08 Yeah, just completely surprised and shocked that something could happen like this in Salisbury.
0:26:15 An assassination attempt against a former spy using one of the deadliest nerve agents ever created,
0:26:19 a chemical that only a handful of government specialists knew about,
0:26:21 Novichok 234.
0:26:26 The spy was found half-dead alongside his unconscious daughter.
0:26:29 But thanks to some remarkable medical work, they both survived.
0:26:34 Another local resident, a mother of three, did not.
0:26:38 She died after coming into contact with the Novichok.
0:26:41 It had been hidden by the assassins in a perfume bottle.
0:26:48 The intended target was soon identified as a Russian intelligence officer who had fled to Britain in 2010.
0:26:55 Prime Minister Theresa May announced to a shocked parliament that Moscow was to blame.
0:27:02 The government has concluded that the two individuals named by the police and CPS
0:27:06 are officers from the Russian military intelligence service,
0:27:10 also known as the GRU.
0:27:17 The GRU, the main directorate, Russia’s fearsome military intelligence agency,
0:27:22 an organisation with goals that should have consigned it to Cold War history,
0:27:27 misinformation, civil disorder, violence, assassinations.
0:27:33 Under Vladimir Putin’s long watch, the GRU has quietly grown in power and influence.
0:27:38 In the weeks that followed the poisoning, Russia aggressively denied its involvement.
0:27:42 The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, meanwhile,
0:27:44 launched its own investigation.
0:27:48 Sending its experts to Salisbury to pour over the evidence.
0:27:56 They produced a highly classified dossier based on shared intelligence and chemical analysis from the site.
0:28:00 The dossier also included Russia’s own version of events.
0:28:04 These were the documents Paul now had in his hands.
0:28:12 It was fascinating to read all this kind of close detail, you know, the Russian version of the story.
0:28:20 And then the other very interesting part of the documents was the actual formula for Novichok.
0:28:24 The chemical diagram for the poison.
0:28:28 A technical outline for something that had been kept hidden from the world for decades.
0:28:31 A weapon of mass destruction.
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0:29:17 So what have we got?
0:29:21 Fart 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 sort of staple chiefs of paper.
0:29:27 Those documents that Marsalek handed over that day at the Kefershenka, Paul showed them to me.
0:29:33 And, well, they’re internal documents from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
0:29:36 And these have been sort of illegally photocopied, right?
0:29:37 Or so I think they’re photocopies anyway.
0:29:42 Yeah, they’re all kind of photocopies, except that one is a PowerPoint presentation.
0:29:44 They’ve all got barcodes on them.
0:29:48 And this sort of big stamped watermark, which says…
0:29:52 This printout may contain OPCW confidential information warning.
0:29:54 Yeah.
0:29:57 They’re all different copy numbers, though, as well, aren’t they?
0:29:58 Yeah, which is kind of curious.
0:30:07 The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is an international body based in The Hague.
0:30:11 Almost all of the world’s big military powers are signatories.
0:30:17 Its job is to police and monitor weapons like Novichok, to ensure they are never, ever used.
0:30:24 What was going through your head when you kind of first pulled this out of the manila envelope that they were all in?
0:30:27 Well, I was looking for a story.
0:30:34 You know, the Salisbury poisoning had been headline news for weeks on end.
0:30:43 Suddenly, I had, you know, what clearly were kind of classified documents pertaining specifically to that event.
0:30:45 There had to be a story in it.
0:30:46 You know, that’s what I was after.
0:31:00 And I was struck at how detailed and careful and yet completely fanciful the Russian version of events was.
0:31:06 In the documents, the Russians made the case that the British had manufactured Novichok.
0:31:12 Because Salisbury is just down the road from Porton Down, a highly secure military research base.
0:31:20 And the Russians, they argued that the British government had somehow leaked the Novichok from its own chemical research lab.
0:31:24 You know, I asked him, you know, point blank, where did he get this information?
0:31:25 What did he say?
0:31:26 He said he got it from a friend.
0:31:34 And he did actually say that, you know, if I wanted further information, I should try him in future.
0:31:39 That I’d be quite surprised at the sort of information he could access.
0:31:50 So this was sort of like a little bit of an opening, kind of showing his wares, you know, that if you wanted to keep him on side, then he could push other material your way.
0:31:51 Yeah, absolutely that.
0:31:56 He was basically saying, look, I have friends in interesting places.
0:31:58 I can help you in the future.
0:32:02 We were building a relationship on both sides.
0:32:12 While all of this unfolded, Dan McCrum, the lead reporter on the Wirecard investigation, hadn’t been sitting still.
0:32:16 In fact, he’d just found his very own treasure trove of documents.
0:32:28 And these documents, they would change everything because they finally gave Dan the ammunition he needed to prove that Wirecard was a fraud and that Marsalek was at the centre of it.
0:32:32 So when Paul got back to London and Dan told him all of this,
0:32:37 Paul knew it was time to go back on the offensive against Wirecard directly.
0:32:46 And also, therefore, that it was time to fess up to Dan and to tell him he’d been secretly lunching with Marsalek over the past few months.
0:32:57 Paul, you know, he’d gone to meet Marsalek for lunch and he was kind of cultivating this parallel kind of, you know, relationship with Marsalek.
0:33:00 When did you find out about that and what was your first thought?
0:33:01 Oh, man.
0:33:08 There are moments in life when you are taken by surprise.
0:33:19 I basically think he hadn’t wanted to, like, blow my mind whilst I was focused on getting the story because the important thing was to get the story out.
0:33:27 But it had reached the point where it was sort of becoming embarrassing that he hadn’t mentioned that he had quietly been dining with Jan Marsalek.
0:33:29 I’m like, sorry, I’m like, sorry, what?
0:33:38 But then he goes, he’s been flashing around top secret documents with a recipe for Novichok on them.
0:33:44 I think my reaction was if he had just tried to tell me that Marsalek had faked the moon landings.
0:33:57 It was so completely out of left field that you’re like, sorry, what did you just say?
0:34:09 To be clear, we had no evidence that Marsalek actually had anything to do with carrying out the poisonings.
0:34:13 But the fact that he even had these documents was a bombshell.
0:34:20 Not only because the documents made it clear that Marsalek was entangled with something besides just a huge corporate fraud,
0:34:25 but also because Marsalek had effectively chosen to disclose this.
0:34:28 Marsalek pulled the spotlight onto himself.
0:34:31 And it made us realise how little we knew about him at all.
0:34:39 At that point, we just kind of had this sense that Marsalek was this kind of man of action
0:34:44 and was mixed up somehow in Viennese politics.
0:34:49 Wachard’s aggressive surveillance of Paul and Dan intensified.
0:34:53 And they managed to trace it back to a private security company in Vienna,
0:34:57 the capital of Austria and Marsalek’s home city.
0:35:01 Paul and Dan were now going to spend the next few months battling to prove the fraud
0:35:04 with the new documents Dan had received.
0:35:05 But me?
0:35:10 I was about to start a foreign posting in Switzerland and in Austria.
0:35:13 If I was going to be on the ground, Paul thought,
0:35:16 then I could surely make some inquiries.
0:35:23 We already knew that there was a big Vienna angle to all this.
0:35:24 We just didn’t know what the angle was.
0:35:27 We just didn’t know which doors you had to knock on.
0:35:31 We didn’t know who you needed to get to.
0:35:32 Yeah, well, it worked.
0:35:34 I remember thinking you were mad.
0:35:38 I just thought, OK, all right, I’m just going to go to Austria
0:35:41 and start talking to people about Marsalek.
0:35:42 But, you know, you were right.
0:35:52 Sometimes it’s the smallest, most unpromising or unexpected little thread that you pull on that suddenly unravels something.
0:36:00 Sometimes that thread is just an intuition, a feeling about someone, a sense that there’s definitely something more here I don’t know about,
0:36:02 but that I recognise the shadow of.
0:36:12 As it turned out, this particular trace, well, it would slowly unravel into a story that wasn’t just the sordid tale of one well-connected fraudster,
0:36:18 but instead the tale of one of the biggest spy scandals to have hit Europe since the Cold War.
0:36:27 To this day, I remember that first note coming back from you, just saying that you needed a secure channel to communicate.
0:36:34 The detail you put in that first note was just mind-boggling, absolutely shocking.
0:36:37 It was like a whole world just opened up.
0:36:42 You know, this was no longer just about some weird German corporate.
0:36:50 There was this kind of huge geopolitical kind of side to the story that was only just coming into view.
0:36:57 Maybe you’ve felt in recent years that the world is a less certain place.
0:37:03 That from the background, there are threats or worries you’d never had to think about before that are suddenly present.
0:37:07 Wars that look like they might tip out of control.
0:37:10 Radical politicians tearing at the threads of civil society.
0:37:13 Lies turned into truth by money.
0:37:16 Well, this story is, in some senses, an accounting of that.
0:37:24 A story that can sometimes make you realise how tissue-thin the idea of a stable, law-abiding society can be.
0:37:28 One that’s governed by economic, political and moral rules we’ve all agreed on.
0:37:32 It’s a story about what kind of people get drawn into the world on the other side of that.
0:37:34 And what kind of world that is.
0:37:43 A space carved out by crime and corruption, where money and power are unchecked by laws, or borders, or markets.
0:37:47 That kind of world might sound terrifying.
0:37:50 But to some people, it’s irresistible.
0:37:53 To some people, it’s not an alternative world at all.
0:37:55 It’s the real world.
0:38:01 Coming up this season on Hot Money.
0:38:03 I know politics is corrupt.
0:38:04 I know everything.
0:38:04 I know that.
0:38:05 I know that.
0:38:06 I believe to know that.
0:38:07 But this is too much.
0:38:12 I thought, I hope that he will talk to you and you will be able to investigate on it.
0:38:17 And perhaps misdeeds and misbehaviour is stopped.
0:38:19 Very fast, actually.
0:38:22 He started then talking about his experience in Syria.
0:38:29 He definitely has a view that he’s operating with complete freedom to do whatever he likes.
0:38:32 I don’t know if they followed me to my home.
0:38:34 The decision was very simple.
0:38:38 It was a choice between being killed or in prison.
0:38:42 And the other option was just to try to get real freedom.
0:38:45 How much of it was an act?
0:38:46 How much was genius?
0:38:47 How much was learned?
0:38:48 How much was instinctive?
0:38:54 I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all?
0:39:03 Hot Money is a production of the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries.
0:39:07 It was written and reported by me, Sam Jones.
0:39:11 The senior producer and co-writer is Peggy Sutton.
0:39:13 Our producer is Izzy Carter.
0:39:15 Our researcher is Maureen Saint.
0:39:18 Our show is edited by Karen Shakurji.
0:39:21 Fact-checking by Keira Levine.
0:39:26 Sound design and mastering by Jake Gorski and Marcelo de Oliveira.
0:39:29 With additional sound design by Izzy Carter.
0:39:35 Original music from Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphonette.
0:39:38 Our show art is by Sean Carney.
0:39:44 Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley, Amy Gaines McQuaid and Matthew Garrahan.
0:39:47 Additional editing by Paul Murphy.
0:39:55 Special thanks to Rula Kalaf, Dan McCrum, Laura Clark, Alistair Mackey, Manuele Zaragoza,
0:40:02 Nigel Hansen, Vicky Merrick, Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Jake Flanagan, Jacob Goldstein,
0:40:05 Sarah Nix and Greta Cohn.
0:40:06 I’m Sam Jones.
0:40:19 This is an iHeart Podcast.
In 2020, the Financial Times exposed a 2 billion euro fraud at Wirecard, a high-flying German fintech. Many thought that was the end of the story. But for reporter Sam Jones, it was just the beginning.
This season on Hot Money: Agent of Chaos, from Pushkin Industries and the Financial Times, Jones investigates Wirecard’s chief operating officer who vanished just as Wirecard collapsed. And turned out to also be a Russian spy.
Here’s episode 1. Listen to Hot Money: Agent of Chaos wherever you get your podcasts.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.