LETTER FROM VIENNA

With the face of a financial whiz, piercing eyes and a suit and tie, he stands out on the German police's most wanted list. Vanished into thin air in June 2020, Jan Marsalek, the flamboyant former number two at the online payment company Wirecard, which went bankrupt after considerable accounting fraud, is still at the top of the criminal police's hit list, officially wanted for "organized gang fraud involving billions of euros."

But the reason why this 43-year-old Austrian is so sought-after is also because he became a high-flying spy on Russia's payroll. "He was one of their very, very, very big assets," said Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist specializing in Russian espionage, who for the past three and a half years has been tracking the incredible career of this spy-businessman, whose trail was lost on June 19, 2020 on a small airfield south of Vienna. A few hours after the extent of the fraud committed at Wirecard's Munich headquarters came to light, he boarded a private jet heading to Belarus.

Since then, successive revelations about his profile each time surpass the already thrilling content of the documentary Netflix devoted to Wirecard in 2022. In a new installment published on Friday, March 1, Grozev and his colleagues at the weekly Der Spiegel reveal, for example, that Marsalek allegedly began working for the GRU, the Russian intelligence services, after entering into a romantic relationship with a former film actress, Natalia Zlobina, in 2013. Zlobina, who played the role of a 13-year-old spy in an American flop entitled Red Lips II (Donald Farmer, 1996), is said to have switched to real espionage and "hooked" Marsalek by introducing him to her GRU contacts.

As head of one of Germany's most prominent digital companies, Marsalek had access to a wealth of sensitive financial data. But above all, he would have sought to collaborate with Russian military intelligence out of a fascination for the world of espionage. "Everyone who knew him well says he wanted to be more than rich: He wanted to disrupt the way the world worked," said Grozev. "Thanks to Wirecard, he had access to data and skills potentially useful to any intelligence service. He offered them to the Russians because they could offer him things no other service could."

In this case, it was the scent of risk. In 2017, for example, he travelled to Syria with Zlobina to observe the takeover of Palmyra by Bashar al-Assad's forces with the help of the former Russian mercenary group Wagner. In his folie de grandeur, Marsalek then planned to deploy an army of private military personnel in Libya, with the aim of blocking African migrants. It's been quite a journey for an Austrian raised in a small town outside Vienna, who joined Wirecard without ever having graduated from high school. However, his grandfather, Hans Marsalek, had already been suspected of spying for the USSR after the Second World War.

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