‘They came across as muppets’: Christo Grozev on being target of Bulgarian spy ring

Christo Grozev was sitting in a New York cafe in February 2023, expecting to fly back to his home in Vienna that evening, when US law enforcement officials delivered some news that changed his life.

“I was told that it’s not a good idea for me to leave back to Austria, because there’s been some intelligence suggesting there’s a red team waiting for you,” said Grozev, a Bulgarian-born investigative journalist who has infuriated the Kremlin by exposing numerous Russian intelligence operatives in recent years.

“My question was: ‘Could this be just hacking and surveillance?’ And they said: ‘From what we’ve seen, it’s definitely more than that.’”

That was the only information Grozev was given, but he did not board that flight. A few weeks later, news came of coordinated arrests in Britain of members of a Bulgarian spy ring believed to be working for Russian intelligence.

Last week at the Old Bailey, a jury found three of the group – Katrin Ivanova, Vanya Gaberova and Tihomir Ivanov Ivanchev – guilty on espionage-related charges. Over many weeks of court hearings, the jury heard how the trio were part of a group that travelled to Vienna and other European locations to surveil Grozev. Plans were developed to kidnap and deliver him to Russian operatives, which ultimately were never implemented.

The plotters’ ideas were sometimes more bluster than substance, and occasionally prompted laughter from the jury, but Grozev said he was relieved at the guilty verdict nonetheless. “They may have come across as muppets, but it’s clear that their plans could have been incredibly dangerous,” he said.

Grozev first came to prominence with his work for Bellingcat, a group of online sleuths who used traditional journalistic tools combined with combing leaked Russian databases to identify Russian operatives – first uncovering the suspects in the 2018 Salisbury novichok poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, who were from Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency. Two years later, he identified the FSB poisoning squad behind the attempt to kill the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, also with novichok nerve agent. At the time, Navalny called him “a modern-day Sherlock Holmes”.

These investigations apparently put Grozev firmly in the sights of Russia’s vengeful intelligence apparatus, along with his collaborator, the Russian journalist Roman Dobrokhotov, with whom he now works for the online outlet the Insider, and who was also surveilled by the Bulgarian ring.

While he knew there was a danger of reprisals for his work, the appearance of a concrete threat forced him to introduce new security measures into his life. But just as he was adapting to them, in the weeks after the initial warning in New York, he received more unwelcome news – his father had died unexpectedly in Austria. “I had to breach all of these instructions and fly there to attend to the funeral,” he said.

On that visit, he spent three days living in a safe house, but there was no burial because Austrian police impounded his father’s body for tests to see if there was anything suspicious. Grozev said he never received a conclusive answer as to whether there was any foul play, but seeing evidence presented in the London trial of how the Bulgarian ring had located his father’s apartment led to increased suspicion.

“I had written it off as a coincidence, but something that brought that story back is the photo of Ivanova in front of my dad’s apartment with an arrow on how to get into it. I guess we’ll never know,” he said.

During the trip back for his father’s funeral, the Austrians told Grozev the group tracking him apparently had links to Jan Marsalek, the Austrian-born fugitive chief executive of Wirecard, who is accused of coordinating his actions with handlers in the Russian intelligence structures.

Marsalek contracted a Bulgarian living in Britain, Orlin Roussev, to run the spy ring. Roussev pled guilty and did not stand trial, but the evidence included thousands of messages exchanged between him and Marsalek, who is believed to be in Moscow.

Grozev had published numerous investigations into Marsalek, an unusual player in the global espionage game. He is wanted in Europe over a €1.9bn (£1.6bn) bank fraud, and disappeared soon after news of the scandal broke in 2020. Reporting by Der Spiegel suggests he may have been recruited by Russia as early as 2014.

In the messages presented to the Old Bailey, Marsalek repeatedly refers to discussions with “our friends” over mission planning, suggesting that he became a trusted freelancer for the Russian intelligence services.

Grozev sees in Marsalek a successful businessman who developed supervillain ambitions: “He got so much money so early on, he scammed so many people early on, and he just wanted to be bigger than just a super-rich guy, he wanted to be an international player,” he said.

Numerous intelligence agencies would have tried to recruit Marsalek, Grozev believes, as his Wirecard company offered “cash conversion capabilities” that every intelligence agency needs. “But not everyone offered that he could become one of them, and the Russians did,” he said.

Engaged by Marsalek, Roussev ordered his Bulgarian ring to track Grozev and Dobrokhotov. Over a period of many months, the team followed Grozev, covertly recorded him, had Gaberova friend him on Facebook with the goal of setting up a honey-trap sting, and even claimed to have broken into his Vienna apartment. A plan was discussed to launch a kidnap mission during a visit to Kyiv, but this was called off by Marsalek at the last minute.

Grozev does not recall ever spotting his unwanted followers, but his teenage daughter may have done so. On one occasion, when he took her to an outdoor restaurant in Vienna for lunch, she told him she thought there was a Russian spy surveilling them. “She told me: ‘He’s been walking back and forth like four times, and every time I look at him, he raises his camera and he pretends to be filming or take photographs of the building above us. And this building is very ugly, so there’s nothing to photograph!’”

At the time, Grozev told his daughter to leave the spy tracking to him, but much later, it transpired that this was the day on which Ivanchev had been tracking Grozev in Vienna.

These days, he prefers not to disclose too much about his current living arrangements, but he has been forced to stay away from Vienna. “I have no idea where my home is. Apparently it cannot be Bulgaria, it cannot be Austria or any Schengen country. There is a feeling of unrootedness that has plagued me for two years now.”