They Came Across as Muppets' Journalist Reveals What It Was Like to Be Target of Spies

Christo Grozev was sitting in a New York cafe in February 2023, expecting to fly back to his home in Vienna that evening, when US law enforcement officials delivered some news that changed his life.

- Shaun Walker

Christo Grozev was sitting in a New York cafe in February 2023, expecting to fly back to his home in Vienna that evening, when US law enforcement officials delivered some news that changed his life. "I was told that it's not a good idea for me to leave back to Austria, because there's been some intelligence suggesting there's a red team waiting for you," said Grozev, a Bulgarian-born investigative journalist who has infuriated the Kremlin by exposing numerous Russian intelligence operatives in recent years.

"My question was: 'Could this be just hacking and surveillance?' And they said: 'From what we've seen, it's definitely more than that."

That was the only information Grozev was given, but he did not board that flight. A few weeks later, news came of coordinated arrests in Britain of members of a Bulgarian spy ring believed to be working for Russian intelligence.

Last week at the Old Bailey, a jury found three of the group - Katrin Ivanova, Vanya Gaberova and Tihomir Ivanchev - guilty on espionage-related charges. The jury heard how the trio were part of a group that travelled to Vienna and other European locations to surveil Grozev. Plans were developed to kidnap and deliver him to Russian operatives.

The plotters' ideas were sometimes more bluster than substance, and occasionally prompted laughter from the jury, but Grozev said he was relieved at the guilty verdict nonetheless. "They may have come across as muppets, but it's clear that their plans could have been incredibly dangerous," he said.

Grozev first came to prominence with his work for Bellingcat, a group of online sleuths who used traditional journalistic tools combined with combing leaked Russian databases to identify Russian operatives - first uncovering the suspects in the 2018 Salisbury novichok poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, who were from Russia's GRU military intelligence agency.