Once upon a time, the Russian intelligence service recruited a bunch of hopeless Bulgarian spies, including a lab technician, a painter and decorator, a mixed martial arts fighter nicknamed “the Destroyer” and a beautician from Acton crowned “Queen of the Lashes” at the 2020 International Beauty Awards.
The ringleaders plotted honeytraps, blackmail, disinformation campaigns, kidnap and murder in service of the Kremlin, targeting journalists, dissidents, politicians and Ukrainian soldiers training at a US military base in Germany. They chose codenames such as “Mad Max”, “Van Damme” and “Jackie Chan”. One had an email with “007” in it. The bosses referred to their subordinates as “the Minions”.
This was one of the most ambitious espionage rings of modern times. But they weren’t very good at it. Their tradecraft was sloppy in the extreme. On surveillance missions they tended to wander off to look at polar bears in the zoo, or for shopping trips to Harrods. They took selfies during operations.
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They seemed to find each other irresistible: one man was in a long-term relationship with another of the group, but also sleeping with a third, who had recently broken up with a fourth. The lothario kept his women keen by pretending to have terminal brain cancer, which he “proved” by sending photos with what was obviously loo paper wrapped around his head to represent a postoperative bandage. They fell for it.
When police raided the ringleader’s home, a rundown former boarding house in Great Yarmouth, they found 78,747 incriminating Telegram messages on his personal phone. The mastermind was an IT specialist who referred to himself as “Q Branch”, but he had forgotten to delete them. Several members of the gang claimed they thought they were working for Interpol, not Russian spooks.
“Who are Interpol to you?” one of the interrogating officers asked.
“From the movies,” said the would-be spy, sounding embarrassed. “Just, uh, chasing criminals.” This was followed by a flash of inspiration, and the acknowledgement that his involvement was “right now the dumbest thing I have ever done in my life”.
This could be a script from a Bulgarian version of Slow Horses, in which the spies are absurdly, comically incompetent, closer to Mr Bean than James Bond. No publisher would touch a novel with such an improbable plot. But as so often in espionage, truth is not only stranger than fiction; it is also considerably madder.
Last week, three of the gang were found guilty of espionage charges, three others have already pleaded guilty and a seventh, a fugitive businessman accused of involvement in a €1.9 billion fraud, is hiding out somewhere in Russia after assuming the identity of an Orthodox priest.
Christo Grozev is one of the investigative journalists allegedly targeted by the Kremlin after he revealed a failed attempt to kill the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny by lacing his underpants with the Novichok nerve agent (another plot device that would be rejected as implausible in fiction).
Following the trial, Grozev observed: “They may have come across as muppets, but it’s clear that their plans could have been incredibly dangerous.”
“Dangerous muppets” is a perfect description of the sort of people often drawn into the spy game, individuals as thick as they are threatening, fragile fantasists easily manipulated into criminal acts of violence. “The byways of espionage are not populated by the brash and colourful adventurers of fiction,” wrote John le Carré. The spymasters may be brilliant, their minions almost never.
The case indicates a clear change of tactics on the part of President Putin’s spies: instead of deploying trained professionals, as in the attempted murder of the Russian double agent Sergei Skripal, these were naive amateurs, long-term “illegals” (spy jargon for agents living apparently ordinary civilian lives), harder to trace and, ultimately, expendable.
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“We have seen a significant change in the way that they operate,” said Dominic Murphy, the head of Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism command, describing Russia’s new spy strategy. “Trying to use criminal proxies and groups like this to do their work rather than directly. This is one of those clear examples of outsourcing of intelligence work.”
The Bulgarians were highly paid and well equipped. In what the IT specialist called his “Indiana Jones garage”, police uncovered 221 mobile phones, 495 Sim cards, 258 hard drives, 33 audio recording devices and 55 surveillance cameras, some hidden in sunglasses and stuffed toys. Alongside these were huge quantities of fake identity documents, including 75 passports from nine countries, the UK among them, and 91 bank cards in different names.
The most chilling discovery was a military-grade Razor II surveillance device (costing £120,000), an interceptor capable of capturing the subscriber identity numbers of individual mobile phones. Police had never seen such a device in criminal hands before. The spies were allegedly planning to deploy the Razor II to a military base in Stuttgart where Ukrainian soldiers were believed to be training in the use of Patriot air-defence systems. If it could gather the soldiers’ mobile numbers, these might be used on the battlefield, where a cluster of phones could pinpoint the location of a Patriot battery for Russian target-spotters.
For all their carelessness and bragging, the group’s leaders planned operations of the most sinister sort, such as selling a stolen US Switchblade drone to China, where it might be reverse engineered. The exchange of messages included extravagant ideas for covert operations to destabilise the Kazakhstan government: “Hacking Kazakh nuclear power, leaking sex videos and crushing their currency … also, maybe a deepfake porn video of the son of the president.”
“Yes, these are cool and very feasible,” responded the spy-handler.
At times during the three-month trial the Old Bailey jury erupted into fits of giggles, but as the prosecutor Alison Morgan KC told them: “This was espionage activity of the highest level of seriousness.”
The bungling Bulgarians represent what Scotland Yard calls “a new kind of emerging threat”: dumb and dumber; dangerous and dangerouser.
