Bulgarians spied on US base and dissidents for Russia, UK court told

By Michael Holden and Sam Tobin

A team of Bulgarians carried out surveillance on a U.S. military base in Germany where Ukrainian forces were being trained, one of six operations they undertook as part of a spying conspiracy for Russia, prosecutors told a London court on Thursday.

Katrin Ivanova, 33, Vanya Gaberova, 30, and Tihomir Ivanchev, 39, are accused of being part of a highly sophisticated spying network, run by a Russian agent named as Jan Marsalek, an Austrian national, which gathered surveillance of individuals and locations in Britain and abroad.

Prosecutor Alison Morgan said the trio had put many lives at risk. The three defendants deny the allegations.

Morgan told jurors at the start of the trial at London's Old Bailey court that two other men, Orlin Roussev and Bizer Dzhambazov, had admitted being part of the spying conspiracy.

She said the group had carried out surveillance, used false identities, deployed advanced technologies and compiled detailed reports in return for significant sums of money.

They were acting under the direction of Roussev who himself was receiving instructions from Marsalek, who used the false name of Rupert Ticz, Morgan said. Marsalek is the former chief operating officer for collapsed payments company Wirecard and his current whereabouts are unknown.

Ivanova, Gaberova, and Ivanchev deny a charge of conspiracy to gather information useful to an enemy between August 2020 and February 2023. Ivanova also denies possessing false identity documents. Their trial is expected to last until February.

'SIX OPERATIONS'

Morgan told the jury that the spying ring had been involved in six key operations, including one involving surveillance in late 2022 at the Patch barracks in Germany, a U.S. base near Stuttgart where Ukrainian troops were being trained to use surface-to-air missiles.

Other alleged operations involved surveillance on Christo Grozev, a Bulgarian national who worked for the investigative website Bellingcat and was the lead investigator on its reports about the 2018 poisoning of the Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England.

Roussev and Marsalek in 2021 exchanged messages about Grozev, discussing placing him under surveillance or stealing his computer and taking it to a Russian embassy, Morgan said.

"They even discussed kidnapping him and taking him to Russia or killing him," she added.

Morgan said the group had also targeted Roman Dobrokhotov, a Russian living in Britain who is editor in chief of The Insider, Bergey Ryskaliyev, a former Kazakh politician granted asylum in Britain, and Russian dissident Kiril Kachur.

The sixth operation involved staging a demonstration outside the Kazakh embassy in London to create the pretence they had details of those responsible, which they would pass to Kazakh intelligence to gain favour with Kazakhstan on behalf of Russia, Morgan said.

Morgan said their activity was extremely risky personally, and involved following targets on planes and even envisaged that the two female suspects would be used as a "honey trap, as sexual bait to capture more information from their targets".

The prosecutor said the defendants might argue that they were "ignorant as to what was really going on" or had been misled about what they were doing and why.

Morgan added: "It is inconceivable that they did not know what they were doing and why they were doing it."

Britain's relations with Russia, already at their worst in decades over Moscow's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, have been further strained by recent reports that Kyiv has used British long-range missiles inside Russian territory.

On Tuesday Russia expelled a British diplomat it accused of espionage, while in October the UK's domestic spy chief accused Russian intelligence services of seeking to cause "mayhem".