# ‘The dumbest thing I’ve ever done’: spy trial’s tales of scheming, bluster and a love triangle

It began with a simple request, though it was written by one of the world’s most wanted men. “We’d be interested in a Bulgarian guy working for Bellingcat: Christo Grozev,” the author wrote at 7.46pm on 14 December 2020. Another message followed on Telegram: “Can we look into this guy or would it raise too many questions?” And so a spy ring of Bulgarians based in Britain but working for Russia began to form.

The author was Jan Marsalek, a fugitive businessman accused of involvement in a €1.9bn fraud on the German payments company Wirecard – and an agent for . Earlier that year he had fled to Moscow, and now he had time on his hands. The message’s recipient was Orlin Roussev, 47, an IT specialist and private investigator who had been based in the UK for several years – and somebody Marsalek appeared to know well.

At Marsalek’s direction, Roussev built a network of Bulgarians whose activities stretched across  – from Vienna to Valencia, Stuttgart to Montenegro.

Their work included intensive surveillance, magnified by talk of kidnap and murder, but there was also bluster and bravado, amateurish planning and chaotic mistakes. And in the background was a tangle of relationships, a love triangle and a fake cancer diagnosis. All three defendants told the court they had been manipulated, and two of the three even said they had thought they were working for Interpol, not Russian intelligence.

Much of this played out in court seven at the Old Bailey during a three-month trial of three of those involved, described dismissively by Roussev as “the minions”. The defendants were each charged with a single count of espionage, which they denied – saying they had been manipulated. But the most revealing details emerged in the extraordinary dialogue – across 78,747 Telegram messages – between the ringleader, Roussev, and his boss, Marsalek, that police had been fortunate to find. The key breakthrough, officers acknowledged, was finding the messages on Roussev’s phone: the IT specialist had forgotten to press delete.

Body-worn camera footage of Roussev’s arrest at his home, a former guesthouse in Great Yarmouth, shortly after 6am on 8 February 2023 shows officers finding hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of IT equipment piled up in several rooms in what Roussev called his “Indiana Jones garage”. With police officers at his throat, Roussev boldly tried to claim “I think it’s the wrong place” – but the weight of evidence was such that he pleaded guilty to espionage before the trial began.

In December 2020, when Marsalek asked Roussev to start collecting information about Grozev, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was still more than a year away. In Britain, MI5 hoped that Russian spying was at a low ebb. After the UK had expelled 23 Russian diplomats in 2018 after the , Moscow was believed to no longer have any traditional embassy-based spies at its disposal.

Keen to maintain its espionage activities however, the Kremlin concluded new methods were needed, recruiting criminals and the naive, often without training, to carry out its dirty work.

Prosecutors and police concluded the spy ring was involved in six main plots. The first – and one of the two most important – was the intensive surveillance of Grozev across Europe, coupled with efforts to seize his laptop, a particular obsession of Marsalek’s. Grozev had worked with Navalny – before the latter’s ill-fated return to Russia – on the investigations exposing the poisoning plot and its links to the FSB, which had embarrassed the Kremlin.

“Our friends are 95% certain Grozev is ‘managed’ by MI6,” Marsalek wrote in January 2022.

|Jan Marsalek. |

At Marsalek’s direction, Roussev first orchestrated the surveillance of a villa linked to Grozev in his native Bulgaria. The effort then expanded to Vienna, where the journalist lived, and then to following him to a Bellingcat conference in Valencia, Spain.

A camera was trained on Grozev’s apartment in Vienna, though they discovered he was living at his father’s flat out of town. His post was intercepted. Marsalek and Roussev discussed hacking his wifi in Vienna – and they regularly debated kidnapping him or worse, though abduction plans did not develop. It “feels like we must poison him next, just to live up to past stories”, Marsalek wrote to Roussev in September 2021.

|A selfie of Vanya Gaberova and Biser Dzhambazov shown to the jury. |

Roussev found a way to obtain airline reservations and told Marsalek he was paying somebody at Swissport, which provides airport services, €1,000 a month to access the system. They monitored Grozev’s travel plans and worked out he was going to the Bellingcat event in Valencia in September 2021. Plans were made to follow him, but Roussev did not carry out surveillance himself – in fact, he was not described as having left the UK at all. To carry out the operations on the ground, Roussev needed a team.

Biser Dzhambazov, 43, was a medical courier working in London and a close friend of Roussev. The operation’s number two, he called himself Max, or “Mad Max”. In his WhatsApp chats with Roussev, he called himself “Van Dam”, after Jean-Claude Van Damme, while his boss was “Jackie Chan”. Dzhambazov was described in the trial as a larger-than-life character, always laughing and joking – “the soul of the party”, one defendant said. Like Roussev, he pleaded guilty and did not appear or give evidence in the trial.

In August 2021, as the surveillance of Grozev in Vienna was getting going, Dzhambazov’s personal life was becoming more complicated. He had known Katrin Ivanova, 33, a lab technician and the first defendant in the spy trial, since she was 17 and had lived with her for years. They worked at the same firm and lived in a one-bedroom flat in Harrow, north-west London. But that spring he had met the second defendant, Vanya Gaberova, 30, a beautician, and by August he was declaring his feelings for her – insisting his relationship with Ivanova was effectively over.

|Katrin Ivanova. |

She told the jury she had been manipulated by Dzhambazov, with whom she said she had been in an abusive relationship, though it was not violent. She told the court she had no idea she had been spying for Russia, portraying herself as apolitical. Instead, she said she had been told Grozev was a corrupt journalist and she was going to help expose his relationship with an arms dealer.

The chief prosecutor, Alison Morgan KC, used Ivanova’s personal life to try to show she was not a naive victim but somebody with her own judgment and agency. Morgan described Ivanova as a liar but “not a stupid person”, and she forced her to admit to the court that she had also been having an affair.

“I want to kidnap him right now,” Marsalek wrote to Roussev. Ivanova told the jury she took on the job simply because she was asked to by Dzhambazov. “I was supporting a partner,” she told the court, and insisted she felt no fear in secretly recording the reporter.

“I thought it was like a bandage in a hospital,” she said.

The third and final defendant in court was Gaberova’s ex-boyfriend Tihomir Ivanchev, a painter and decorator, who was arrested a year after the two women. The most peripheral of the three, he said he was recruited by Gaberova and Dzhambazov to help with the surveillance of Grozev in Montenegro. Unlike the two other defendants, who chose to undergo cross-examination from Morgan, he did not give evidence, but he was the only one to have given a detailed police interview.

Ivanchev described his recruitment by Dzhambazov in a conversation outside a pub in the autumn of 2021. He said he was not shown any fake ID by Dzhambazov, but was persuaded that he worked for Interpol when Dzhambazov showed him some pictures of faked passports from his phone. Ivanchev said he was asked to help Dzhambazov, though there was no training and no equipment was provided. Ivanchev was asked to go to Vienna where he would take some pictures relating to the surveillance of Grozev on his own phone, for which he would be paid €200 a day plus expenses – though this was cut to €150 after he was accused of being lazy. “There was too much pressure for this money,” he told police.

|The car to contain the Imsi catcher was rigged up with a large red button at the front on the left above the air conditioning vent. Prosecutors said this was to power up the surveillance device. |

Reconnaissance completed, the planning for the audacious operation continued. “Our friends here have asked to ask you/the team to be extremely careful,” Marsalek warned in early December. Roussev managed to buy a left-hand-drive Chrysler for £4,200 in cash from a secondhand dealer in the UK. A plan was made to secrete the Imsi catcher within and power it with an extra car battery. Police found the car in a community garage attached to Dzhambazov and Ivanova’s flat in Harrow, and it had been rigged up with a large red button at the front. “It might as well say ‘press go for Imsi’,” Morgan theatrically told the court.

Police believe the plan appeared to be technically sound, but it was foiled days before it was due to be carried out by the pre-dawn arrests of Roussev, Dzhambazov, Ivanova and Gaberova.

Investigators traced more than €210,000 of money flowing from Roussev to the others involved, principally indirectly via Dzhambazov. For all the soap opera of relationships and behind-the-scenes boasting, Cdr Dom Murphy, the Met’s head of counter-terrorism, said the spy ring’s activities were sophisticated, they engaged frequently “in lifestyle surveillance”, and “the concern is what is it  going to be used for”.

Today, Grozev lives in New York, away from his family, because Europe is no longer safe enough. And as the events described at the Old Bailey demonstrate, Russia’s threatening efforts persist and increase.
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