The former Wirecard board member and Austrian Jan Marsalek led a double life for years.
As a joint investigation by SPIEGEL, ZDF, the Austrian "Standard" and the Russian investigative platform "The Insider" shows, he has apparently been working for the Russian secret service for over a decade.
He also presumably passed on sensitive data from the Austrian Office for the Protection of the Constitution to his friends in Moscow.
A former department head in the Austrian Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Combating Terrorism (BVT), Martin Weiss, is said to have helped him.
The official was hired by Marsalek as an “advisor” after he officially left the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
He repeatedly had queries carried out about target persons on Marsalek's behalf via his old network.
According to the files of a special investigative unit in Vienna, people were investigated “apparently in the interests of the Russian Federation.”
Accordingly, Marsalek and Weiss were part of an “intelligence cell” whose capacities and capabilities were used by Russian intelligence services.
What secret information did Martin Weiss obtain for Jan Marsalek?
And why was the leak in the BVT not noticed for so long?
In a three-part series in the “Inside Austria” podcast, we reconstruct the research into the crazy agent story about Jan Marsalek.
In the second episode, we shed light on Marsalek's connections to the Austrian Office for the Protection of the Constitution and show how the ex-Wirecard manager may have provided his friends in Moscow with sensitive data from the BVT.
In the weekly podcast “Inside Austria,” SPIEGEL and “Standard” look together at the big and small scandals in Austria.
Together with journalists from both editorial teams, we reconstruct cases and events that move the country.
We look into the political abyss, follow the investigations surrounding the Sebastian Kurz case and his ÖVP and provide information about an important Austrian topic of the week.