A spies' nest during the Cold War, Vienna has clearly lost none of its reputation despite the fall of the Iron Curtain. The arrest of a former Austrian intelligence officer suspected of years of collaboration with Russia on March 29 has caused unprecedented upheaval in this Central European country which, despite its "neutrality," remains the target of political, economic and security infiltration operations by Moscow.

After acknowledging on Friday, April 5, that the affair in question constituted "a national security problem," the conservative chancellor, Karl Nehammer, announced a tightening of the current anti-spying legislation, which is very permissive. His justice minister, the environmentalist Alma Zadic – who has declared that she wants to do away with the country's image as a "haven for spies" – has promised to introduce a bill to raise the ceiling on sentences for espionage, which are currently set at a maximum of five years.

It has to be said that the revelations that have been appearing one after the other almost daily in the press since March 29 concerning the activities of the arrested former agent, Egisto Ott, are hard to believe. Now in pre-trial detention, Ott, who had specialized in monitoring extremism at the former Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BVT in German), has been accused by the Vienna public prosecutor's office of having "collected secret information from police databases with the aim of passing it on to representatives of the Russian authorities," according to the arrest warrant revealed by the weekly newspaper Falter.

Ott, 61, who was known to have been involved in countless spying schemes over the past 10 years or more, had certainly been suspended from the BVT back in 2017, following information from allied services on how he had sold confidential information taken from Western databases to the Russians for several tens of thousands of euros. However, surprisingly, he was then cleared by the courts and reinstated in another department of the Ministry of the Interior. All the while, according to the investigators, he continued his secret activities for Russia.

Information shared by the UK in early 2024 eventually prompted the Austrian authorities to take action. The previous year, the British services had arrested a cell of Bulgarian citizens working secretly for the former manager of the now-defunct online payment service Wirecard, the notorious Jan Marsalek.

Having disappeared into thin air since his company went bankrupt in the summer of 2020, Marsalek, an Austrian citizen, was actually an agent paid by Moscow. He continued this activity, very probably from Russia, by taking advantage of his privileged access to Ott and other former Austrian service agents, all reputedly close to the Freedom Party of Austria, a far-right party with pro-Russian leanings.

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