当当网出走者李国庆曾两次请辞 与老婆不该在一公司

This is an audio transcript of the Hot Money: Agent of Chaos podcast episode: From ‘Matryoshka’

Sam Jones
Previously on Hot Money?.?.?.?

Moira Scott
First of all, I thought someone might have been murdered, but I did think, well, there’s no ambulances or anything and there’s no police cars. And then I saw these men or women all blacked out with balaclavas on.

Helen Warrell
Marsalek really was like a sort of ghost that haunted this trial. He was clearly the organising mind, and he was there in black and white in these Telegram messages.

Paul Murphy
If I was a border control guard, though, I would notice the expiry date on that Czech passport. Passports never last more than 10 years, do they?

Sam Jones
Right. I mean, I didn’t know that.

Paul Murphy
That doesn’t look right.?

Sam Jones
I’m back with Paul Murphy, my old editor, and the person who first put me on to the Jan Marsalek story. And I’ve brought copies of some identity documents: passports and a few photos. Konstantin?Vladimirovich?Bayazov. I’ve got a picture of him here, dressed in a kind of very ornate gold Orthodox priest’s kind of mantle, carrying a candle. Oh no, it’s not a candle — it’s a chalice, covered with a cloth. Looks like a sort of slightly more weathered Marsalek, but they do look similar — similar kind of face shape.

Paul Murphy
They do actually.?

Sam Jones
Yeah. So basically, he’s nicked his identity.?

Paul Murphy
If he’s travelling to places like Dubai as a Russian Orthodox priest, that’s gonna kind of crimp (Sam laughs) his operation.?

Sam Jones
I have no idea if Marsalek actually travelled anywhere, dressed in the full vestments of the Russian Orthodox church, but I do know this is one of the identities he’s been using in recent years. And there are plenty more. Some are from real people, some are names that are completely made up. A Frenchman from Strasbourg: Alexander Schmidt, and a Belgian of the same name, an Austrian: Max?Meier. I’ve also had tips about a possible Israeli identity, even a Namibian one.?

Paul Murphy
I noticed that he’s lopped a couple of years of his age.

Sam Jones
Which one?

Paul Murphy
The Belgian driving license (Sam laughs). You think he’s born in ’82. He wasn’t.

Sam Jones
Oh, yeah.

Paul Murphy
He was born in 1980.

Sam Jones
For much of the last few years, figuring out ways to conceal his identity has really been the major preoccupation for Marsalek. Disappearing in an age of ubiquitous CCTV — and now facial recognition software — it’s no easy task. So much so that he’s even told people he’s had plastic surgery, and yet, despite being one of the world’s most wanted men, Marsalek has managed to maintain allies in countries all over the world. I’ve already told you about his networks in Austria, the UK and Libya, but his connections actually reach much further. Something brought into focus by the reams of messages that were revealed through the case of the Bulgarian spy ring, the trial we heard about in the last episode. Those messages show that Marsalek has a network of business contacts, corrupt officials and pals that spans the globe.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

And there’s one particular network that I want to discuss with Paul. And actually, you know, information came to us really at, well, at the end of the trial, that kind of points to the fact that this network of his around the world, it might include some contacts that are a lot more surprising than any we’ve found out about so far.

I’m intrigued. Because Jan Marsalek, he’s someone who’s dedicated himself to acting in Russia’s interests, working in the shadows to push the Kremlin’s agenda, but not exclusively. I’m Sam Jones from the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries. This is Hot Money Season 3: Agent of Chaos, Episode 8 — Matryoshka.

Peggy Sutton
Great. Thanks again for picking us up.?

Voice clip
(Inaudible)

Sam Jones
Before we get to Marsalek’s wider network, there’s someone I knew I needed to speak to. Someone who can help me understand what Russia really wants, and why an agent like Jan Marsalek is the perfect fit. Chris Donnelly lives in a remote corner of Britain. My producer Peggy and I travelled there to meet him.?

Voice clip
Hi there. This is Sam.

Sam Jones
Hi, nice to meet you.?

Chris is a respected Kremlin analyst, a cold warrior. And at 79, Chris still finds himself a personal target for Russia. His house burned down under mysterious circumstances several years ago, and as a result, he’s still regularly in contact with Special Branch — the unit of the UK’s police who handle sensitive political cases — about possible ongoing threats to him.

Chris Donnelly
Still really is an issue. The police have the house under storm alert. We’ve got security systems.

Sam Jones
Right. OK.?

Chris Donnelly
We’re not sure what, you know, how it came to burn down?.?.?.?

Sam Jones
We’re sitting in the drawing room of Chris’s ancient manor house. Through the window, our view’s across rolling hills to distant peaks. Chris has offered us a glass of dry white wine while his wife gets an omelette lunch ready in their big farmhouse kitchen. The contrast between what we’re here to talk about, the very English romance of the setting, and Chris’s quiet, generous hospitality is almost surreal — and not for the first time in this series, I feel the thinness of the boundary between the conventions of spy fact and fiction. Especially when he tells me how all this started for him. Back when he was 22 years old, Chris was studying for a Russian language degree and had a desire to really immerse himself in the country. On his second visit there, his idealism met with the reality of Russian power head-on. It was 1968.?

Chris Donnelly
I drove my Mini there with a colleague and we ended up being arrested and put on trial and thrown out the country.

Sam Jones
Wow. You’d driven your Mini?.?.?.?

Chris Donnelly
To Moscow, and then from Moscow down to the Caucasus, and then from the Caucasus into Ukraine. I wonder why all the roads were full of tanks.?

Sam Jones
Chris had inadvertently driven his Mini Cooper into one of the defining events of the cold war, a crackdown that would forever change the reputation of the Soviet Union. Those tanks were on their way to Czechoslovakia to unseat the country’s government and stop its liberal reforms.

Chris Donnelly
From the Russian point of view, it was obvious we were there to spy on the tanks. From our point of view, they were just obstacles in the way of our driving. We didn’t know what was going on.

Sam Jones:
Blimey. OK, what was (laughs).?.?. Must have been a bit of a hair-raising experience.?

Chris Donnelly
It makes you think. And it set me on a course of wanting to understand the mentality, and why and how Russians think differently.

Sam Jones
Chris tells me he spent a week in jail in Odesa before the Russians sent him home. He would go on to become one of the most respected Russia watchers in the west. He taught for years at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. And his expertise meant he would eventually advise the leaders of western governments on Russia and how to handle it. And then 1989 came.

By then, Chris was working for Nato. He’d heard that something was going on at the border between west and east Germany, so he drove there to see it for himself. And what he witnessed — it’s an image that has stayed with him vividly ever since. A family leaving east Germany. The first time they were free to do that in decades.

Chris Donnelly
A family of five stuffed inside the Trabant, which is something smaller than a Mini and made of cardboard with a two-stroke, three-cylinder engine. They then moved through the gates and out into Germany. They were suddenly surrounded by?a thousand people waiting for?.?.?.?and pull them out of the car just to?.?.?. Do you have money? I thought, it’s happened. There’s no control of this.

Sam Jones
I can see exactly why this makes Chris well up to this day. His whole adult life, he dedicated himself to trying to understand and fight this huge repressive regime, and suddenly in a blink, it was tumbling apart. All captured in that one single human moment of a solitary car, a single family driving to their freedom, being welcomed by thousands of fellow Germans they’d been forcibly separated from all their lives.

Chris, like almost everyone, thought the fall of the wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union that followed was the beginning of a new world. But in Russia itself, change brought chaos. And in the dying days of the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, Putin and his people began to come out of the shadows.?

Chris Donnelly
So these guys are not politicians in the western sense of people who have risen through political party processes. They are former intelligence officers and military people with an intelligence war mindset and a war mindset who have now turned the tradecraft of the KGB into the statecraft of the Russian state.?

Sam Jones
A mindset that began all the way back in 1917 when the Russian Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power and has endured ever since.

Chris Donnelly
Because the whole Russian system remained on a war footing and never moved to a peacetime footing, because it lived with this understanding that the world was hostile. All the outside world’s hostile. Everyone’s an enemy and we might have to fight.

Sam Jones
As Chris tells me more about how Russia thinks about war, I begin to better grasp the plots that Jan Marsalek organised to better understand how they fit into a Russian strategy, and what the principles of that strategy are.

Chris Donnelly
So the first principle of war in Russia is surprise. It’s actually vnezapnoe. Suddenness.

Sam Jones
Suddenness, yeah.

Chris Donnelly
The second principle: activeness. Keep moving, keep them off balance. The third principle is maskirovka. Hide what you do, ’coz there’s no ground to hide behind. No hills or valleys to move up in secret.?

Sam Jones
Many of these principles, as Chris explains, can be traced right back to things as simple as the geography of Russia itself. Like that last one, maskirovka. Your forces need to mask their intentions through psychological tricks because they can’t rely on the environment, the flat open terrain to hide them.?

Chris Donnelly
You’re all in the open, so you have to be deceitful in the good sense of the term. Then temp operatsii, the tempo of the operation. You got to keep the whole thing moving at a large scale and not get bogged down. You don’t know where the enemy is.

So razvedka boem, reconnaissance by battle. You actually attack the enemy to find out what he’s gonna do, because he doesn’t know either. So intelligence can’t do that. So everything’s proactive, starting from your basic principles.

Sam Jones
You don’t need to worry about staying hidden if you can confuse. You don’t need to be careful if you can be fast. And with all of this, you can give your operatives?.?.?.?You want to give your operatives a whole load of freedom to make decisions. You let them succeed or fail based on their own merits. You just set an overarching objective and then let your agents see how far they can push things.?

Chris Donnelly
You’re giving the guys free license to go and attack what they can and destroy it as long as they maintain that main aim. The mentality is coherent throughout the whole approach. They makes sense.

Sam Jones
To a western intelligence agency, it might look reckless to cultivate an agent like Marsalek, the author of a massive fraud with an appetite for the high life and a penchant for games and mystery. But to the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency — an organisation primed to test constantly for points of weakness, to act unexpectedly and to push, push and push in areas where it suddenly finds advantage — it makes total sense. Now, I do want to be clear that not all Russian intelligence is like this. But the GRU school of covert action, it’s the one that has really come to dominate Russian thinking in recent years. The GRU is having its moment.

So, I mean under that description, would you say that to take that kind of battlefield doctrine and apply it to European society at large, that we kind of got to a stage at one point where Russian intelligence had kind of broken through and was so successful and then people would, yeah, just go and make a mess. Go and break things.?

Chris Donnelly
Yeah. The fact there is a controlling mind directing the attack, doesn’t mean to say that that mind is micromanaging with a long screwdriver for every little operation. You couldn’t do it. Not without slowing everything down.?

Sam Jones
I suppose it’s a very different way of covert action to what we might think of in the UK or the US.

Chris Donnelly
Yeah.?One of the biggest differences is it carries with it a lot of risks. But in Russian terms, it’s not unjustifiable risk. In war, you have to take risks and you have to reward people for taking risks, and you have to let them make mistakes and learn from them. You have to have trial and error in war. At the moment in the west, we have error in trial.?

Sam Jones
This all seems like it very neatly ties a bow on this story, that it helps us to understand Marsalek as the perfect Russian agent of chaos. Except, as I keep telling you spy stories, they tend to take unexpected turns. And the more I delve into the Telegram message haul, the one from the trial of the Bulgarians in London, the more I begin to feel that there’s an important complication to all of this. Because Marsalek’s relationship with the Russian state, it’s not entirely straightforward, not entirely clear-cut.

When I think of the most successful Russian spies of perfect agents, being a Brit, there’s someone who instantly comes to mind: Kim Philby. One of the most effective spies of the cold war. A Russian mole right at the top of British intelligence for years.

I don’t mean to compare Marsalek to Philby in terms of what they did as spies, but just to observe that when Philby eventually had to flee to Moscow, he was given a hero’s welcome, a new official life, a prestigious apartment, and that is not what appears to have happened to Jan Marsalek.

Take all those passports, Paul Murphy and I were looking at. When I went back to the messages between Jan Marsalek and Orlin Roussev, Marsalek’s man in Great Yarmouth, the guy helping to run the Bulgarian spy ring, I started to see hints of a different narrative. We’ve asked a friend of the show to read Marsalek’s messages.

Voice clip
The good thing is the French guy even looks a bit like me, but we can change the name, right??

Sam Jones
They spend a long time discussing how to make this passport look real, and they talk about their options to get others from Marsalek too. You see, in the messages, while it’s the plots and the schemes that are the marmalade droppers, it’s actually the crumbs of meaning between the headline material that can open up a whole new perspective on things. So to me, the implication here is that Marsalek’s escape to Russia isn’t something that’s been organised with official sanction, because Russia’s secret services don’t seem to be automatically furnishing Jan Marsalek with new documents. He’s having to get them for himself through Roussev, and sometimes struggling. And this isn’t the only thing that tells me Marsalek’s new life in Moscow is complicated.

After Marsalek disappeared, I suppose we all thought that this €2bn hole in Wirecard accounts, at least some of it, must have been money plundered by him. But in reality, in Moscow, at least early on, he seems to be having money problems. Here, he tells Roussev about his wrangles with the FSB, Russia’s main domestic intelligence agency.

Voice clip
Sorry, I was fighting the whole day today with the cash crypto guy and the FSB. Effing mess.?

Sam Jones
He and Roussev discuss in dozens and dozens of messages how we might open a bank account in Russia, which is near impossible without official documents. They talk about how they might use crypto brokers to try and get money for him. Marsalek tells Roussev it’s a media narrative that he’s got tens of millions stashed in bitcoin. I asked my colleague Helen Warrell about what she made of all of this because she covered the trial for the FT, but also because she spent many years covering intelligence and security.?

Helen Warrell
He talks about at one point that the FSB having to approve his cleaning lady. So, you know, there’s obviously lots of sort of domestic issues. You know, almost every part of his life is somehow constrained and overseen. And you get the impression that he’s constantly trying to prove his use to the FSB in the GRU in a way that sort of seems slightly exhausting and also quite kind of needy.

You can see that he’s sort of bridling against the idea that he’s in captivity here. Before obviously he became, you know, a wanted person by Germany and Interpol, he led this very international lifestyle. And there are signs that he’s trying to sort of get back to that, albeit in quite a constrained way.

Sam Jones
What all of this says to me is that Marsalek is not an on-the-books agent, someone who is controlled by Russian intelligence in a formalised way. And it seems he’s even having to work hard to justify his host’s continued protection. But maybe there’s a flip side to having a less structured relationship with the Russian state. A little bit more freedom to pursue your own interests where you can anyway. In June 2021, for example, Marsalek began discussing a new scheme with Roussev. The Russian state will need to be kept informed.?

Voice clip
I’m waiting for input from our friends.

Sam Jones
And indeed, they’ll be a client in this scheme, but the scheme primarily will be a moneymaking operation with Marsalek and Roussev as the middlemen to sell arms to clients in Africa. Roussev tells Marsalek his contacts want to spend up to $60mn on guns and other weapons. He’s already organised a test run for the route, he says, via Dubai. They will be paying in diamonds.

Voice clip
Fancy rebels.

Sam Jones
Marsalek evidently sense a further opportunity if they cannot just transport the arms, but also sell them themselves.

Voice clip
Do they have a supplier for the guns and vehicles or can we become an end-to-end supplier? We can also provide training if needed.?

Sam Jones
Neither of them cares who these weapons are going to. Marsalek asks if it’s a government-backed force, and Roussev replies, who knows? Then the letters TIA, which stand for ‘this is Africa’. It’s a quote he likes to use, he tells Marsalek, from the movie Blood Diamond. This kind of scheme — it’s not a one-off. Marsalek is also involved in setting up a back channel to get weaponry from China to Russia: drones, for example, or ways to smuggle microchips into the country too.

Helen Warrell
I mean, I would say that the things that involve making money are things that Roussev and Marsalek come up between themselves, sort of brokering arms deals, you know, trying to get weapons from China to Russia, to help on the Ukraine battlefields in a kind of deniable way. So, I would say their moneymaking schemes are things that they suggest rather than things that come down from the top.?

Sam Jones
And many of these schemes involve offering kickbacks to men at the GRU and the FSB in order to get them off the ground, as Marsalek tells Roussev, his new life in Russia?.?.?.?

Voice clip
It’s like a Russian matryoshka doll of motivations within secret ambitions.

Sam Jones
You may have had a Russian matryoshka doll when you were a kid. They’re those wooden dolls that have a series of slightly smaller dolls within them. Marsalek reportedly had a set in his office featuring great Russian leaders, past and present. The novelty is, I suppose, that you’re never sure when you’ve reached the innermost doll. The core of something.

In this story, I’ve sometimes had the feeling that we never will. That with Jan Marsalek and his many personas, the surprises will just keep coming. Even so, I wasn’t quite prepared for the next one, which came to light at the end of the Bulgarian trial at their sentencing.

In May, Orlin Roussev appeared in court to be sentenced. At the outset of the trial, he had pled guilty. But his lawyer had a wild card to play — a plea for mitigation.?

Helen Warrell
This was a very surprising development, I have to say. It was also, I would say he quite a sort of bold and risky gambit by Roussev’s lawyer. He essentially told the court that Marsalek had received a request from the CIA to help airlift some US personnel from Kabul during the military withdrawal in August of 2021.

Sam Jones
So, that is quite the claim: Marsalek contracting for the CIA, working on demand for the arch nemesis of his Russian pay masters. Roussev’s defence made the case that getting Americans out of Kabul was a humanitarian action and showed that he deserved a more lenient sentence, because he had been willing to help out western interests too, when it was a question of saving people’s lives. You might recall the situation after nearly 20 years, the US military was withdrawing from Afghanistan, but the final months of that process were chaotic.

The Taliban unexpectedly surged towards Kabul, the capital. Thousands of westerners and many Afghanis who had worked with them were desperate to flee, and there simply weren’t enough flights out the country. The prosecution told the judge that Roussev’s whole argument was wrong. Firstly, they said, there was no evidence that the CIA ever made such a request. And second, they poured cold water on the idea that Roussev had some kind of humanitarian conscience at his centre.?

Helen Warrell
I mean, obviously the prosecution came back absolutely full throttle against this?.?.?.?

Sam Jones
They really tried to slap it down.

Helen Warrell
They did. And you know, they said, look, this is not evidence of a humanitarian motivation. It just shows that these people were motivated by money and they do whatever work was necessary by whoever was prepared to pay them. And, you know, the idea that somehow they were as happy to work for the CIA as they were for the GRU or the FSB, was sort of a misleading idea.

Sam Jones
The thing is though, this wild claim about the airlift made by the defence barrister in court, it’s all there in black and white in the Telegram messages between Roussev and Marsalek from the time.

Voice clip
Interesting request for our sort of friends at the CIA.

Sam Jones
This is Marsalek writing to Roussev on August 17th 2021, three days after the evacuation of Kabul began.

Voice clip
They urgently need aircraft to fly out contractors from Afghanistan. Apparently, all dodgy airlift companies in Russia and Turkey, etc are already sold out or refuse to fly because insurance won’t cover the loss of an aircraft. Do you know anyone who’s a bit rogue and operates large-scale aeroplanes?

Sam Jones
Now Roussev, he does know people who can fly planes. He replies that his father operated as a pilot of Fortune for years and has lots of experience in quote, exotic locations like running guns into Africa, he writes. It will be tricky though, Roussev tells Marsalek. The situation on the ground in Afghanistan is a nightmare. Marsalek replies?.?.?.?

Voice clip
America needs you. Pax Americana rests on your broad and manly shoulders.?

Sam Jones
There’s evidently some tongue-in-cheek here, but the Telegram messages. The more of them I read, the less they seem like a joke. There’s so much detail here. They discuss plane types, costs, timing, permissions for landings and airspace access.

Voice clip
Just discussing with the Americans, apparently, since 11am today, the airport is OK. And 15 military aircraft took off today, but it can change any moment.

Sam Jones
I can’t tell you what did or didn’t happen in Kabul regarding these flights in the end, but I have three hypotheses. One: Marsalek has himself been duped. The people he’s talking to aren’t really anything to do with the CIA. Two: he’s lying, either because he’s trying to impress Roussev or because it’s part of some disinformation ploy. Or three: it’s true. He really was trying to set up flights for people at the CIA, or at least people close to it. But then something else came to mind — something which happened way back in the winter of 2018.

Paul, do you, do you remember the uncles?

Paul Murphy
I do.

Sam Jones
I’m chatting with Paul Murphy again, my former editor, about a lead we had been given about Marsalek. At the time, we set it aside because it was just a single fleck of evidence, and frankly, we had our hands full.

Paul Murphy
We were at that point of intense coverage of the Wirecard fraud story, and suddenly, out of the blue, I got an email from somebody anonymously saying that they had been looped into an email conversation accidentally. And I might be interested in the content.?

Sam Jones
Been looped in, as in someone had typed the wrong email address and they had sent it to them.?

Paul Murphy
Precisely, precisely that.

Sam Jones
The person who accidentally received this chain of emails was a software engineer based in Hong Kong. Paul dispatched a reporter to meet this person. The software engineer didn’t want to forward the emails electronically, so they gave the reporter hard copies and the reporter faxed them to Paul.?

Paul Murphy
And they’re quite extraordinary. It was a series of emails between a group of, I assume, men who refer to themselves as the uncles, and they were talking to Jan, who had been put in touch with them to get advice on a particular challenge.

Sam Jones
Paul and I dug up the emails. Here’s the first message Jan Marsalek sends to the uncles.?

Voice clip
Gentlemen, it is a great pleasure meeting you, exclamation mark. Our mutual friend speaks very highly of you, and I look forward to meeting you in person one day. Thank you for introducing us and your kind introductory words.?

Sam Jones
Marsalek goes on to explain why he’s getting in touch. He needs help with a project he’s working on. An attempt to move the Austrian Embassy from Tel Aviv to?Jerusalem.

Voice clip
It’s been suggested that you may be able to provide us with advice on how to establish an informal channel to explore the United States’ position on the subject and to provide guidance on how to navigate the complexities of the issue within the international community. Also, any assistance in shaping the domestic dialogue on the subject in Austria would be appreciated.

Sam Jones
Suffice to say that moving embassies in Israel has become a symbolic issue for some parts of the far right in both Austria and the US. With that in mind, the big question is: who are the uncles?

Paul Murphy
There are kind of, whatever the five or six email addresses, all Proton mail addresses. We were able to identify a number of these.?

Sam Jones
Yeah, ’cause there’s sort of giveaway snippets of information in the emails themselves that allow us to assign identities to these different people in this email chain, right, with a relatively high degree of confidence of who they are. And we don’t want to mention them for legal reasons at this stage. But, I mean, you can tell us about who these kind of people are, what kind of world they?move in.

Paul Murphy
OK, so one of them is a very senior former CIA officer, somebody who oversaw, you know, active operations in a certain theatre of war. Another one is a former US ambassador. We’re talking here about people who are, you know, basically ex-US military, ex-US intelligence, all talking together online and calling themselves as a group — the uncles. The fact is we didn’t know what to make of this at the time.?

Sam Jones
No, it was just so weird because, you know, we thought, OK, we’ve got other stuff on our plate, and this is so tangential to what we’re doing. And then, seven years later, the messages about this airlift and Kabul came to light. And I began to wonder whether there was some kind of network here after all — a group with links to the CIA that Marsalek had somehow found his way into, maybe a group who shared some particular geopolitical views on the world and values.

This great line, let’s please remember that we should also pay some attention to financial opportunities while you all play your Game of Thrones, which encapsulates for me the kind of like, this is the kind of weird world that these people are in, where they are simultaneously looking for opportunities to make money through corruption and, you know, dodgy-dealing business. And also, they’re looking to kind of, you know, exert geopolitical leverage and change, through informal means, through back channels, through people like Jan Marsalek.

Paul Murphy
There’s a real sense here that Jan was actually knitted into this group.?

Sam Jones
Yeah. What we don’t have is any, you know, huge trove of evidence. But what we do have is kind of an intuition that there’s something here. There’s the shadow of some kind of network or world or you know, a group of people that crosses countries that Marsalek is involved with. And this isn’t just a Russia thing anymore.

When I think of many of the people I’ve learned about, as I’ve reported on this series, people who’ve been cultivated by Marsalek and who have cultivated him money, power and risk. Those seem to be what motivates them all. But actually, something else I think is behind the pursuit of those things. The key, something we’ve been bumping up against for this entire series. Disdain for the way the ordinary world operates, for living by the rules, being limited by them. I mean this both as a psychological characteristic, but also as a broader political one that you might better describe as anti-establishmentism, a political belief that things need to be undermined, broken.

For Jan Marsalek, I’ve come to understand this as a big part of his view of the world. A gifted, if flawed, young man — but someone whose pursuit of what made him different fed a deep cynicism about what he saw as the pieties of the world most people lived in. And he sought out worlds that seem to expose that: a payment processing company making its money from gambling and porn, the ease of establishing a vast international fraud. And, of course, spying.

It is one of the biggest seductions of spying that you are inducted into a secret club. The people who really run the world, people who make decisions and don’t have to follow the normal moral rules of society. When I first heard about Jan Marsalek, I felt he was the key to understanding something about Russia, the country that first lured him in. A country whose government had turned disdain against the liberal world order into its entire mode of statecraft. But actually, what I now think is that it’s not just a story about Russia. It’s a story about us too. Because, this disdain, this anger against the establishment, it’s spread. It’s no longer something in the shadowy world of. Crime and clandestine political networks. It’s a political force. It’s a way of doing business. Funnily enough, I think it was Kilian Kleinschmidt, who we met in Tunisia, who first latched on to this notion. Fitting, I suppose, given that he was the first to give me an insight into the destructive life of Jan Marsalek.?

Kilian Kleinschmidt
That’s his kick. That’s his adrenaline. It’s like playing a video game or something. The rules-based world is increasingly collapsing, so it gives also more and more space for this. That’s what has been happening over the last few years.

Sam Jones
So it’s kind of?.?.?. It’s Jan’s world out there.

Kilian Kleinschmidt
The Jan’s world becomes the normal.

Sam Jones
Marsalek, and people like him, they are agents of chaos. They’re playing a game against the world they were born into, and they’re winning.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Hot Money is a production of the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries. It was written and reported by me, Sam Jones. The senior producer and co-writer is Peggy Sutton. Our producer is Izii Carter. Our researcher is Maureen Saint. Our show is edited by Karen Shakerdge. Fact-checking by Kira Levine. Sound design and mastering by Jake Gorski and Marcelo de Oliveira, with additional sound design by Izii Carter. Original music from Matthias Bossi and Jon Evans of Stellwagen Symphonette. Our show art is by Shawn Carney.

Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley, Amy Gaines McQuade and Matthew Garrahan. Additional editing by Paul Murphy. Special thanks to Roula Khalaf, Dan McCrum, Laura Clarke, Alastair Mackie, Manuela Saragosa, Nigel Hanson, Viki Merrick. With special thanks to the studio Audioberlin and to James Morris, who read Jan Marsalek’s messages. And Eric Sandler, Jake Flanagin, Jacob Goldstein, Sarah Nix and Gretta Cohn. I’m Sam Jones.