A Russian spy ring run from a Norfolk seaside hotel was part of an intelligence network stretching across Europe, orchestrated by a maverick businessman with access to the secrets of the West’s leading intelligence agencies.
Extraordinary details of the operation can be revealed after the Old Bailey trial of three of the spies.
The espionage network dates back to 2015 when the financial company boss, Jan Marsalek, contacted Orlin Roussev, a Bulgarian IT expert based in the City of London who specialised in signals intelligence — the interception of communications.
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Marsalek, 44, was at the time chief the operating officer of Wirecard, an international payment company with headquarters in Bavaria, which initially serviced pornography and gambling websites.
Marsalek, whose grandfather was in the KGB, had been introduced to Russia’s military secret service agency, the GRU, in 2014 by an alleged “honeytrap”, Natasha Zlobina, 40. The actress played a Russian agent in the erotic horror film Red Lips: Bloodlust. She could not be reached for comment.
Marsalek contacted Roussev soon after and asked him to put together a network of London-based agents who could carry out surveillance operations on the ground.
The first hire was Biser Dzhambazov, 43, a fellow Bulgarian who moved to London in 2012. He had close links with leading politicians in Bulgaria and the country’s embassy in London.
Dzhambazov was made “operations controller” and recruited his girlfriend Katrin Ivanova, 32, who showed an expertise in using the technical spy equipment which had been built or bought by Roussev.
He then recruited his friend Ivan Stoyanov, 32, a martial arts cage fighter known as “The Destroyer”, from Greenford, west London.
Dzhambazov then met Vanya Gaberova, who owned a beauty parlour in Acton, also in west London, while helping arrange polling stations in London for Bulgarian elections. Gaberova was swiftly recruited by Dzhambazov and subsequently became his lover as well.
She in turn recruited her former boyfriend, Tihomir Ivanchev, 39, a former champion open water swimmer from Enfield, north London,
Dzhambazov, Ivanova and Stoyanov all got jobs at the Doctors Laboratory in central London while Ivanchev worked as a painter and decorator. Ivanova, Gaberova and Ivanchev have since claimed they believed they were working for Interpol. On Friday, they were convicted of spying for Russia.
To assist the growing funding of their operation, Marsalek sent hundreds of thousands of pounds to a business registered by Roussev under an alias.
Investigators in Germany and Austria claim that in addition to the UK operation, Marsalek used his position at Wirecard to organise and pay for other clandestine operations across Europe and in Africa.
In 2015 he hired Martin Weiss — then the head of operations for BVT, Austria’s domestic intelligence service — as a consultant. All intelligence information collected by the agency, including that shared by the CIA, MI6, Mossad and Germany’s Bundesnachrichtendienst, went through Weiss’s department.
Weiss and another senior BVT official, Egisto Ott, are accused by prosecutors in Austria of providing information to Marsalek which was forwarded to Moscow. The investigators claimed some of the information was used for assassinations by Russian hit squads.
Marsalek also allegedly obtained a Nato cryptography machine and information from the mobile phones of three senior officials in Austria’s interior ministry which was sent to Russia.
After Weiss was arrested in 2021, Marsalek boasted of helping him escape, telling Roussev: “I just managed to evacuate my Austrian guy to Dubai.” Weiss is believed to be in Dubai and could not be reached for comment.
Ott was arrested last year on suspicion of spying for Russia at Marsalek’s behest following information from British intelligence. He denies wrongdoing.
Marsalek was also drawn into the Russian intelligence agencies’ work in the Middle East. In 2017, he travelled to Syria with Anatoly Karazi, the head of intelligence for Wagner, the Russian mercenary group. He also offered to pay a former senior United Nations official €200,000 (£165,000) to prepare a report for the “Russian-Libyan Cultural Institute” based in Moscow, and discussed plans to recruit a private army of 20,000 Libyan militia fighters.
Wirecard collapsed in June 2020 with the loss of 6,000 jobs when £1.6 billion appeared to be missing from its accounts. Marsalek fled to Russia, where he assumed the identity of Vitaly Malkin, an Orthodox priest. He did not respond to requests for comment.
Some of the information passed to Marsalek from the files of the Austrian intelligence agency was forwarded to the spies in Britain for use in their operations, including details about the investigative journalist Christo Grozev who lived in Vienna.
Ott is also accused of giving the UK-based agents a highly-encrypted Sina laptop used by German intelligence which was subsequently delivered to the Lubyanka, the headquarters of Russia’s federal intelligence service, the FSB, in Moscow.
Scotland Yard believes the “lifestyle” information gathered by the British spies on investigative journalists and opponents of President Putin of Russia could be used for assassination attempts.
Roussev bought the three-star Haydee Hotel in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, to act as his headquarters as the espionage operation expanded after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The 33-room hotel was packed with spy equipment including a £120,000 Imsi recorder which could identify mobile telephones being used in the surrounding area. There is no record of where the highly-technical Imsi came from and it is believed to have been supplied by the Russian intelligence service.
Police raided the hotel in February 2023 on the day the gang planned to take the Imsi to a US military base in Germany where Ukrainian soldiers were being trained in the use of surface-to-air missiles.
Information from the device would enable Russian forces to target the soldiers on the battlefield.
Ukrainian soldiers are also being trained at UK military bases. A month before the police raid, Marsalek told Roussev that “after using the Imsi’s in Germany we might want to do the same in the UK”.
