'Dumbest thing I've ever done' Blustering bravado, amateurish planning - and a love triangle

It began with a simple request, though it was written by one of the world's most wanted men.

- Dan Sabbagh

"We'd be interested in a Bulgarian guy working for Bellingcat: Christo Grozev," the author wrote at 7.46pm on 14 December 2020. Another message followed on Telegram: "Can we look into this guy or would it raise too many questions?" And so a spy ring of Bulgarians based in Britain but working for Russia began to form.

The author was Jan Marsalek, a fugitive businessman accused of involvement in a €1.9bn (£1.6bn) fraud on the German payments company Wirecard - and an agent for Russia. Earlier that year he had fled to Moscow, and now he had time on his hands. The message's recipient was Orlin Roussev, 47, an IT specialist and private investigator who had been based in the UK for several years - and somebody Marsalek appeared to know well.

Their target was a high-profile journalist who specialised in investigating Russia's spy agencies. Earlier that day, Grozev and colleagues at the Bellingcat website had published a major investigation. They had implicated eight members of Russia's FSB spy agency - and by inference Vladimir Putin's Kremlin - of poisoning the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny with novichok, lacing his underpants, it later emerged, with the neurotoxin.

After hundreds of hours of surveillance of Grozev, and a few weeks before the spy ring was rolled up by British investigators, Marsalek messaged Roussev to say he did not find the journalist an appealing target but "apparently Putin seriously hates him".

What followed in the two and a half years after that first message was sent was not one plot, but several. At Marsalek's direction and funding, Roussev built a network of Bulgarians whose activities stretched across Europe - from Vienna to Valencia, Stuttgart to Montenegro.