Two women and a man have been found guilty of spying for Russia in a huge espionage operation from a guesthouse in Great Yarmouth.
Katrin Ivanova, 33, a lab assistant from Harrow, north London, Vanya Gaberova, 30, a beautician from Acton, west London, and Tihomir Ivanchev, 39, a painter and decorator from Enfield, north London, have all been convicted of spying for Russia.
The women were both involved in relationships with Bizer Dzhambazov, 43, a medical courier who ran the ground operations of the spy ring.
The spy ring was run by Orlin Roussev, 46, a former City worker who set up a freelance espionage operation from a 33-room guesthouse in Great Yarmouth.
The spy ring’s contact in Moscow was an Austrian man called Jan Marsalek, 44, the former chief operating officer of a major finance and tech company called Wirecard which collapsed in 2020 amid allegations of a £1.6bn fraud.
All are Bulgarian nationals with EU-settled status after living in the UK for a number of years.
‘Jackie Chan’ and ‘Mad Max’ messages on spy ring
Roussev and Dzhambazov both pleaded guilty to espionage charges but the three others denied the charges. Wanted by the German authorities, Marsalek fled to Russia, where he allegedly ran the network.
The spy ring – which operated globally between August 2020 and February 2023 – was revealed in more than 80,000 messages recovered from Roussev and Dzhambazov on the encrypted Telegram messaging app, following their arrest in February 2023.
The pair adopted the names of martial arts film stars – Roussev was “Jackie Chan” and Dzhambazov was “Jean Claude Van Damme” or “Max Max”.
The cell was said to have used “sophisticated methodology” which included advanced technology and false identities in order to acquire information and imagery, before compiling detailed reports on their targets to send to Moscow.
One of the tasks of the spy ring was to gather information about dissidents and prominent individuals of interest to the Russians.
Spying target ‘seriously hated’ by Vladimir Putin
Their targets included Christo Grozev, a journalist who worked for the British investigative website Bellingcat and was responsible for identifying the GRU agents accused of poisoning MI6 double agent Sergei Skripal with Novichok nerve agent in Salisbury in March 2018.
Marsalek said Vladimir Putin “seriously hated” Grozev and contemplated killing him with a sledgehammer.
The spy ring conducted surveillance in Knightsbridge and Kensington in London and even considered using a drone to spray pigs’ blood over the Kazakhstan Embassy as part of a fake protest.
One operation that went ahead involved placing stickers around Vienna and Berlin to discredit Ukraine, including far right messages on a Jewish museum.
Alison Morgan KC, prosecuting, said: “By gathering the information and passing it on to the Russian state, the defendants were, make no mistake, putting many lives at risk.”
Matthew Collins, the UK deputy national security adviser, told the trial the Russians were seeking to “outsource” their covert operations in order to regain a foothold in Britain after the expulsion of spies following the poisoning of Sergei Skripal.
In one message Marsalek told Roussev: “A successful operation on British ground would be amazing after the f*** up Skripal stuff.”
£220,000 ‘Indiana Jones warehouse’
Roussev’s partner paid £220,000 for the Haydee Guesthouse in Prince’s Road, close to the seafront in Great Yarmouth.
He said he was “becoming Q”, the character from James Bond, and called the guesthouse his “Indiana Jones warehouse.”
When police raided the hotel as part of an operation, codenamed Skirp, they found it packed with technical equipment including 495 SIM cards, 221 mobile phones, 258 hard drives, 55 visual recording devices, 33 audio devices, 16 radios and 11 drones.
Police spent eight days combing through the property, which was packed to the ceiling with electronic surveillance equipment, including a £120,000 “law enforcement grade” IMSI grabber.
Much of it was “wearable technology” for recording video and audio such as wristwatches, pens, ties, sunglasses, cigarette lighter, car key fob and jewellery.
There were 91 bank cards in the names of 17 individuals and 75 passports and identity documents in 55 individuals’ names.
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Commander Dominic Murphy, head of Scotland Yard’s SO15, which deals with state threats, said it was one the largest spying investigations in the last 20 years.
“This was spying on an almost industrial scale on behalf of the Russian intelligence services and lots of their activity goes to the very heart of the freedoms and national security that we need to try and protect here in the UK,” he said.
