Speaker 1: Before we begin, I just wanted to warn you this
Speaker 1: episode contains descriptions of physical violence and war. Previously on
Speaker 1: Hot Money, at.
Speaker 2: That point, we just kind of had this sense that
Speaker 2: Marcello was this kind of man of action and was
Speaker 2: mixed up somehow in Viennese politics.
Speaker 3: I know politics is corrupt, I know everything. I know that,
Speaker 3: I know that I believed to know that, but this
Speaker 3: is too much, I thought.
Speaker 2: I hope that he will talk to you and you
Speaker 2: will be able to investigate on it and perps misdeeds
Speaker 2: and misbehavior stopped.
Speaker 1: I'm in tunis, the capital of Tunisia in North Africa.
Speaker 1: I'm in a taxi on the way to meet Killian Klinsmith.
Speaker 1: When I first met Killian at Cafe Procul in Vienna,
Speaker 1: he began to unravel what he knew about Jan Marcelet.
Speaker 1: It was a fantastical tale. It seemed impossible to substantiate,
Speaker 1: and as far as Killian was concerned at the time,
Speaker 1: it was absolutely not for publication. But I believed it,
Speaker 1: and one of the reasons I did was because I
Speaker 1: found out more about who Killian is, not just a fantasist,
Speaker 1: someone who should be taken deadly seriously yes, monsieur. We
Speaker 1: kept in touch and now he's ready to talk to
Speaker 1: me on tape. I can't tell you exactly where he lives.
Speaker 1: In fact, we've put our phones in Faraday bags to
Speaker 1: come here, electromagnetic shields that will stop the phones giving
Speaker 1: away our location. Everything on this trip will be cash only.
Speaker 1: But what I'll say is it's a big private house
Speaker 1: on the edge of a fashionable area of the city.
Speaker 1: It's surrounded by a high white wall, like all the
Speaker 1: houses on this dusty street, and there are great clumps
Speaker 1: of magenta bouganvillia spilling over the top.
Speaker 3: It is this way.
Speaker 1: Ay Killian, I learned, has never led a conventional life.
Speaker 1: I'm not even sure he knows what one is, and
Speaker 1: perhaps that's why he ended up getting so involved in
Speaker 1: one of Jan marsal X's wildest schemes, something so left
Speaker 1: field that it helped me truly see marsal x ambitions
Speaker 1: something about the lives of tens of thousands of the
Speaker 1: world's most desperate people and how they might be controlled used.
Speaker 1: I've often found that people who operate outside the mainstream
Speaker 1: can be weirdly drawn together, sometimes meeting in the ambiguous
Speaker 1: space between what the world deems to be good and bad.
Speaker 1: We tend to think that our values are at the
Speaker 1: core of us, but people on the edge, well, they
Speaker 1: can sometimes show us how fragile that notion can be.
Speaker 1: In this episode, we're gonna hear Killian's story and how
Speaker 1: he found himself in Yan marslex world one very close
Speaker 1: but very different to his own.
Speaker 4: I have said this census that certain things in my
Speaker 4: life since then have done terribly wrong that I sometimes
Speaker 4: think this can be a core incidence.
Speaker 1: I'm Sam Jones from The Financial Times and Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: This is Hot Money, Season three, Agent of Chaos, Episode
Speaker 1: three Prill Seeking, So where do you want us? Killian,
Speaker 1: as we call them. We're walking across a big, open
Speaker 1: plan room that takes up almost the whole ground floor.
Speaker 1: It's cool and airy, and Killian is directing us over
Speaker 1: to an arrangement of low sofas around a coffee table.
Speaker 1: He's left the dogs outside, but indoors, there's an assortment
Speaker 1: of cats who indifferently reveal themselves to us over the
Speaker 1: next few hours. Killian grew up in Berlin in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, and he felt drawn to alternative ways of
Speaker 1: life from a young age. After some hard partying as
Speaker 1: a young punk teen, he left Germany aged just eighteen
Speaker 1: to go and live in the mountains in southern France.
Speaker 1: And so first there were the goats, thirty five goats
Speaker 1: to be exact.
Speaker 4: Making gold cheese, which is a pain in the neck
Speaker 4: because you have to get up at four in the morning,
Speaker 4: five in the morning melting these bloody goats.
Speaker 1: So your first job was as a goat farmer basically.
Speaker 5: Yes.
Speaker 1: Later he founded a housing cooperative, learned how to be
Speaker 1: a roofer and picked up a series of odd jobs
Speaker 1: along the way.
Speaker 4: Worked as a stuntman somehow Any five Movies We Might
Speaker 4: Know or How was a TV series Jan dach.
Speaker 1: Jehan dark as in Joan of harc Yes, okay, but
Speaker 1: Killian was still restless. He left France and he decided
Speaker 1: to tour Africa on a motorbike, and in doing that
Speaker 1: he stumbled into humanitarian and peacekeeping work through a chance
Speaker 1: encounter over what else but drinks.
Speaker 4: I always tell people when they asked me how did
Speaker 4: you do your career? I mean how do you apply it?
Speaker 4: So that said, they got into the baths.
Speaker 1: These are my favorite kind of stories. In a bar
Speaker 1: in Mopti, a city in Marley, Killian met a young
Speaker 1: French couple. They were building a school and he well,
Speaker 1: he had those roofing skills, so he helped them out
Speaker 1: and things just took off from there. He got more
Speaker 1: construction jobs in the AID world. His responsibilities grew. Eventually,
Speaker 1: Killian became a trusted partner for the un working across Africa.
Speaker 1: He'd found the unconventional life he was looking for, but
Speaker 1: he'd yet to experience real danger, and then one day
Speaker 1: all that changed. In nineteen ninety one, Killian was twenty
Speaker 1: nine with a young family. They were living happily in Uganda.
Speaker 1: It was early in the morning, so he didn't hear
Speaker 1: them come in, four men armed. He woke up his
Speaker 1: wife next to him with a kalashnikov pressed against his head.
Speaker 1: Someone had told these four boys, really that he had
Speaker 1: thirty thousand dollars hidden in the house. It was a setup.
Speaker 4: And then they did everything with me what you can
Speaker 4: do to someone who tried to get thirty thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: From as in they beat you up.
Speaker 4: Or beating me up, putting me against the wall and
Speaker 4: saying now we shoot in your legs, Now we rape
Speaker 4: your wife. We've just killed your gardener. We're just oh,
Speaker 4: by the way, we killed your cook. Now we're going
Speaker 4: to kill your baby or baby crying.
Speaker 1: I mean, in that moment, did you think you were
Speaker 1: going to die?
Speaker 4: Yes, because at the four guys looking for something they
Speaker 4: don't get, getting increasingly agitated and angry.
Speaker 3: That's it.
Speaker 1: They turned the house upside down. The money, of course,
Speaker 1: wasn't there, but for whatever reason, they didn't kill Killian.
Speaker 1: In fact, thankfully they didn't kill anyone. They just left
Speaker 1: Killian badly beaten up. The horror of that experience would
Speaker 1: have broken most people, and maybe it did Killian, but
Speaker 1: not how you would expect. I guess most other people,
Speaker 1: or many other people would think, Okay, that's it. I'm
Speaker 1: moving back to the Pyrenees with my wife and my
Speaker 1: young child. I'm guessing that you didn't do that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's kind of correct. My wife said, I headed
Speaker 4: I need a break somehow, and then she left for
Speaker 4: Canada for many months, and I went and said, now
Speaker 4: I need to go into it. I need to deep
Speaker 4: dive into violence.
Speaker 1: And he did. In the coming years, Killian would put himself,
Speaker 1: using his connections in the un into the most dangerous
Speaker 1: places he could. When the fighting died down in one place,
Speaker 1: he moved somewhere else, often somewhere with an even more
Speaker 1: challenging humanitarian situation. South Sudan, Somalia, Zaia, Sri Lanka. He
Speaker 1: describes days hiding in swamps while being hunted by militias.
Speaker 4: I was surrounded by war, I was surrounded by guns.
Speaker 4: Everything I was in fact afraid of or was there plentiful.
Speaker 4: I mean I had sort of transformed from the soft
Speaker 4: gold keeping hippie guy into a tough sort of manager
Speaker 4: him in the middle of the war. And in transformation
Speaker 4: goes pretty fast, I must say.
Speaker 1: He told me about one time his compound in Mogadishu
Speaker 1: was attacked.
Speaker 4: When we get out of the banker, security says it's
Speaker 4: all over, but.
Speaker 1: There's one guy lying in the street in an army uniform,
Speaker 1: and too late they realize he's a suicide bomber, and.
Speaker 4: He pulls the trigger and then and then sort of
Speaker 4: all the body pads fly over the.
Speaker 3: Wall and the rain between us.
Speaker 4: So today, when there's a dead mouse somewhere, that's when
Speaker 4: everything comes back. That's when the images come back of
Speaker 4: dead bodies on the road.
Speaker 1: In another story, he tells me it's the height of
Speaker 1: the battle for control of Mogadishu when he and a
Speaker 1: few others climb up onto the roof of the hotel
Speaker 1: where they're staying at dusk, heavy orange sun is in
Speaker 1: the sky.
Speaker 4: So we were sitting there with a few people having
Speaker 4: a beer or whiskey or so, which we've still managed
Speaker 4: to get and.
Speaker 3: Watching the fighting.
Speaker 4: I mean, what's crazily wild, pervertly romantic in the same time,
Speaker 4: like watching Apocalypse Now or something. We're seeing the black
Speaker 4: Hawks and other choppers flying into the sunset and then
Speaker 4: again fighting somewhere and shooting, and you're sitting on your
Speaker 4: roof and over you're whiskey.
Speaker 1: The horror, it's also bound up with the thrill, with
Speaker 1: the sense that this, and not the comforts of a
Speaker 1: peaceful home life, is what's real. And I do get it.
Speaker 1: Even listening to Killian recount this stuff is intoxicating. There's
Speaker 1: a powerful, hugely seductive kind of beauty to it. It's
Speaker 1: disturbing in some ways, but also cinematic. And who hasn't
Speaker 1: thought about their lives as a film? Can I just ask,
Speaker 1: how are you feeling during this? Were you afraid? I mean,
Speaker 1: given that you've described earlier that in a way you
Speaker 1: wanted to plunge into violence to cure yourself with your
Speaker 1: fear of it maybe or to somehow kind of move
Speaker 1: beyond it.
Speaker 3: I mean that's also what to maintain.
Speaker 4: Organizations are exploiting in a way because they're getting people
Speaker 4: into the sort of this adrenaline hyper thing and they
Speaker 4: begin to feel invincible. You're becoming the coolest of the
Speaker 4: coolest in all of this. I mean, you're completely hyped up.
Speaker 4: I mean I started to feel already very good at this.
Speaker 4: That was just basically after two and a half years
Speaker 4: of being in war zones, and it felt I was
Speaker 4: a champion.
Speaker 3: It sounds like a bit of an addiction.
Speaker 4: It's, of course it's an addiction, and that's but it's
Speaker 4: been also used by the organization.
Speaker 1: The organization meaning the un his employer at the time.
Speaker 1: This is how Killian sees it.
Speaker 4: Identifying the people becoming junkies, and they set them a
Speaker 4: shot from time to time, so they stay junkies. You
Speaker 4: don't get the chance to cool down and get back
Speaker 4: to your family. I mean I had a family at
Speaker 4: the time, sitting in there. Robit that recuperation becomes stressful
Speaker 4: because nobody understands you. I mean, your colleagues become your
Speaker 4: friends and your family. They understand what it means when
Speaker 4: you say, well, we had an ied, we had an
Speaker 4: improvised explosive device, or we had a vbi ID. They
Speaker 4: understand what it means. Yes, there has been a car bomb.
Speaker 4: Nobody else understands. Nobody understands the feeling of what it means.
Speaker 1: Killian climbs the UN ladder, but over time he finds
Speaker 1: his Maverick methods rub up against an increasingly bureaucratic organization,
Speaker 1: and the way humanitarian work is funded is changing too.
Speaker 1: NGO and government budgets are going down, the private sector
Speaker 1: institutions and individual wealthy donors are becoming more important than ever.
Speaker 1: Over time, Killian begins to feel that perhaps he should
Speaker 1: at least try a more normal way of life, so
Speaker 1: after three decades, finally in twenty fourteen, Killian decides to
Speaker 1: leave the UN. He settles in Vienna as far as
Speaker 1: he can settle, and launches an aid consultancy. A burgeoning
Speaker 1: migrant crisis on Europe's borders and in the Balkans in particular,
Speaker 1: means he's in high demand, but he doesn't exactly thrill
Speaker 1: to the work. European governments are mostly looking to find
Speaker 1: short term domestic solutions for the problem. They don't want
Speaker 1: to do the hard stuff tackling it at its source
Speaker 1: in Africa and the Middle East. The consultancy work is
Speaker 1: all about fundraising, meetings with stakeholders, trial a la over
Speaker 1: canopies and powerpoints. It's not a very Killian kind of world.
Speaker 1: Enter Jan Marcelek. It was around this time that an
Speaker 1: Austrian lobbyist government connected got in touch. He tells Killian,
Speaker 1: I want you to meet someone.
Speaker 4: I have a client called Jan Masele. He's the CEO
Speaker 4: of Wire Cards. That is, in his private capacity, he
Speaker 4: wants to contribute to the stabilization of Libya.
Speaker 1: In twenty eighteen, Killian gets an invitation to come and
Speaker 1: meet his new prospective backer, Marcelek. Marcelex suggests they meet
Speaker 1: at the keef Schenker, the very place he met my
Speaker 1: editor Paul Murphy and handed him the chemical formula for Navechok.
Speaker 1: Keifa Schhenk in English means the ladybird tavern lady barg
Speaker 1: If you're American, there are little ladybird emblems and pictures
Speaker 1: dotted around, but it's not Kitchie. This is still a
Speaker 1: white tablecloth place. All Killian knows is that he's meeting
Speaker 1: a wealthy Austrian businessman. He's never heard of Yan Marslek,
Speaker 1: but that's not an issue, at least nothing A little
Speaker 1: keyboard due diligence can't smooth.
Speaker 4: Started googling a bit and okay, a big luge DAX company.
Speaker 1: The DAX is Germany's main stock market index, the forty
Speaker 1: largest public German companies. A bit like the S and
Speaker 1: P five hundred or the Footsy one hundred. It signals
Speaker 1: to Killian that wirecard and mars Lek should be taken seriously.
Speaker 4: I had been sort of a lot looking into how
Speaker 4: the industry, how business can actually do what the humanitarance
Speaker 4: can do. So I thought was a great idea that
Speaker 4: if somebody has personal interests or business interests actually contributes,
Speaker 4: and it's not the humanitarians are going to stabilize places,
Speaker 4: it's business. It's this type of other resources which the
Speaker 4: humanitarian world will never produce.
Speaker 1: Killian has been told that Marcelek is interested in funding
Speaker 1: humanitarian projects in Libya. Libya was a mess since the
Speaker 1: Kadafi regime was deposed in twenty eleven at the height
Speaker 1: of the Arab Spring. It had been mired in civil war.
Speaker 1: Nothing about its future seemed at that point certain, and
Speaker 1: it was also thanks to its newfound lawlessness, a highway
Speaker 1: for African refugees looking to get into Europe, the longest
Speaker 1: then unpatrolled coastline of any African country on the Mediterranean.
Speaker 1: A reporter with the ft Borzu Daragahi was on the
Speaker 1: ground to see what conditions in one of the countries
Speaker 1: notorious migrant detention centers were like.
Speaker 6: Hot, dirty, Overcrowded cells like this one are a way
Speaker 6: of life. At the Garabouli migrant detention Center, just east
Speaker 6: of Libya's capital, Tripoli, rooms meant for perhaps twenty people
Speaker 6: are commonly filled with one hundred. These men, women and
Speaker 6: children have come from as far as Eritrea and Ethiopia.
Speaker 6: They risk their lives along desert smuggling routes lined with
Speaker 6: bandits and other dangers.
Speaker 1: But Libya was also a place rich in opportunities for
Speaker 1: those with an appetite for danger. A huge oil exporting nation,
Speaker 1: a major military power in Africa, a playground for spies,
Speaker 1: the prospect of some work there tantalized Kilian. Marcelek arrives
Speaker 1: for lunch. He's all Polish.
Speaker 3: They got a little bit jealous.
Speaker 4: While the sky is bier de mere and he is
Speaker 4: good looking, and he is well dressed. Everything he has
Speaker 4: smells money and care and everything is perfect.
Speaker 3: And I come with my cheap trousers and whatnot.
Speaker 1: A little envy prompts some German Austrian rivalry.
Speaker 4: Well, there's a typical Austrian sort of showing off person.
Speaker 4: I've seen many of those in Vienna.
Speaker 1: Over lunch, the conversation becomes competitive, what.
Speaker 4: They call alas the male cockfight. In the beginning, they
Speaker 4: try to impress the other one of how cool you
Speaker 4: are and how tough you are, and where you have
Speaker 4: been and so on.
Speaker 1: This is you and Marcelec.
Speaker 3: You know how two cocks are when they're showing the
Speaker 3: nice feathers and so on.
Speaker 1: Killian tells Marcelec stories. He recounts the dangerous, violent and
Speaker 1: volatile situations he has lived in around the world. But
Speaker 1: Marcelek is not to be outdone.
Speaker 4: And then very fast actually he started then talking about
Speaker 4: his experience in Syria, facilitated by the boys. Just after
Speaker 4: the recapture of the city of Panira from Isis.
Speaker 1: When he said, with the boys, what did you now?
Speaker 3: He basically said, with the Russians.
Speaker 1: Marcelek tells Killian that he arrived in Syria in a migate.
Speaker 1: He describes how the helicopter banked and turned, and with
Speaker 1: a blast of dry hot air through the open door,
Speaker 1: he looked down on the vast ruins of Roman Palmyra below.
Speaker 1: He was the guest of the head of intelligence for
Speaker 1: the Wagner Group, Russia's most notorious mercenary army. They didn't linger,
Speaker 1: Marcelex said it was too dangerous, but there was time
Speaker 1: for some photos. I've seen those photos. There's a hastily
Speaker 1: snapped selfie in front of the amphitheater, and another shot
Speaker 1: in in front of a burned out tank, and one
Speaker 1: of him aiming a bazooka. In all of them, Marcelek
Speaker 1: is posing basically in body armor and sometimes wearing dark
Speaker 1: blue aviators. To me, he seems almost boyishly excited. What's
Speaker 1: remarkable is that Marcelek's story, all this boasting about being
Speaker 1: in Syria didn't strike Killian as unusual at the time.
Speaker 1: But Killian is not a very usual kind of person.
Speaker 4: It didn't click in my head that it's a bit
Speaker 4: strange that a payment provider would be going into such
Speaker 4: an area.
Speaker 1: If it had clicked, maybe he could have avoided what
Speaker 1: happened next. I can only assume Killian wasn't taken aback
Speaker 1: because of the way Marcelek framed the story. He told
Speaker 1: Killian that when he saw war ravage Syria for himself,
Speaker 1: he realized he wanted to stop that kind of thing
Speaker 1: from happening elsewhere, like in Libya. Marcelett convinced Killian that
Speaker 1: he wanted to make a difference to make the world
Speaker 1: a better place. As Killian understood it, Marcelett wanted to
Speaker 1: commission a development plan, a blueprint for how to end
Speaker 1: lawlessness on Libya's southern border where there was no government control.
Speaker 4: He spoke about the gold mines at the border to
Speaker 4: Chat where people have to work for two years to
Speaker 4: get their passage to Europe paid off. He spoke about
Speaker 4: the guys sitting in Monaco and being the people behind
Speaker 4: the whole business, that they were earning one hundred dollars
Speaker 4: per person crossing into Europe. He displayed sort of a
Speaker 4: more emotional something has to be done to stop out
Speaker 4: of that.
Speaker 3: And maybe I felt that he was genuine in that.
Speaker 1: Somehow he sounds quite impressive.
Speaker 4: It didn't click as sort of a police ploid at
Speaker 4: that moment. It felt more, Yes, I want to do something.
Speaker 4: I want to contribute, so I will put two hundred
Speaker 4: thousand euros into your Killian and your team so that
Speaker 4: there should be collateral financing to have a full plan
Speaker 4: of what to do with Libya so that this doesn't happen.
Speaker 1: Killian came away from his first lunch with Jan Marsleg
Speaker 1: feeling good about his new project and his new client.
Speaker 1: He built a team and he got to work doing
Speaker 1: research and making plans to pull together a kind of
Speaker 1: feasibility study on how to bring law and order to
Speaker 1: the region and improve the lives of the people living there,
Speaker 1: who to speak to and what to say to them.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't long before there were signs that not
Speaker 1: all was as it seemed. Killian had been told that
Speaker 1: he could trust Marcelec's handshake and that Marcelec wouldn't sign
Speaker 1: a contract anyway, so there wasn't much Killian could do
Speaker 1: about what happened next.
Speaker 3: Then no money. There was no payment for me.
Speaker 1: I mean, did it not strike you as odd that
Speaker 1: there's this. There's this wealthy backer who has money and
Speaker 1: he's just not not paying.
Speaker 4: Yes, of course, I said, what's this? I mean, you
Speaker 4: told me it's undshake quality. Finally engaged with our the contracts.
Speaker 4: Should have never done this, big mistake.
Speaker 1: At this point, Killian is still dealing with marcele X
Speaker 1: through an intermediary marcele X's lobbyist in Vienna, and after
Speaker 1: a lot of pestering about the missing finance, the intermediary
Speaker 1: gives him a very strange answer. He says, send your
Speaker 1: invoice to the Libyan Russian Institute in Moscow, which is
Speaker 1: odd because no such institute even seems to exist there.
Speaker 1: There's more. When Killian suggests that they should organize a
Speaker 1: trip to Libya so he can talk to his backer
Speaker 1: about his plans and show him how they might work
Speaker 1: on the ground. He gets told this will also be arranged,
Speaker 1: but from Moscow.
Speaker 4: The trip will be organized by Colonel tribly Gin under
Speaker 4: the Triblean in Moscow. So who was colonel and the Triblegian, Oh,
Speaker 4: here's the coordinator of Russian interests in Northern Africa and
Speaker 4: the Middle East.
Speaker 1: By now I'm thinking for almost anyone, the jig would
Speaker 1: be up. Whatever this project was, it was not simply
Speaker 1: some idea from an Austrian businessman with a good heart
Speaker 1: and an open checkbook. Killian, though, still didn't pull the plug,
Speaker 1: maybe because at this point he's already paid his team
Speaker 1: a considerable amount of money from his own pocket, and
Speaker 1: he's really quite proud of the work they've done, the
Speaker 1: study they've begun to produce. So he needs to sort
Speaker 1: things out one way or the other, and the only
Speaker 1: way to do that is to demand another face to
Speaker 1: face meeting with Mas. And that's how. In February twenty eighteen,
Speaker 1: Killian finds himself standing on a street corner in a
Speaker 1: wealthy district of Munich. On the opposite side of the
Speaker 1: street is the Russian Consulate. He's waiting directly outside a grand,
Speaker 1: four story Grundadzite nineteenth century villa.
Speaker 4: One of these big mansions will find in Vienna, you
Speaker 4: will find in Munich, you will find in all the
Speaker 4: century of European cities where very wealthy business families built us.
Speaker 1: At some point, it's so big he struggles to figure
Speaker 1: out how to get in. There doesn't seem to be
Speaker 1: a doorbell when.
Speaker 4: Somehow the doors of the villa they open mysteriously.
Speaker 1: This is Jan Marcelek's house and personal office. Marcelect meets Killian,
Speaker 1: who is with a colleague on the first floor. There's
Speaker 1: some impressive contemporary art on the walls, but not a
Speaker 1: lot tells.
Speaker 4: Normal people when they live in a place, there is
Speaker 4: always some crap lying around. I mean it's a place
Speaker 4: where we kind of live. And when I come into
Speaker 4: place like that and it feels like it's like a showroom,
Speaker 4: it's nothing personal.
Speaker 1: They enter a capacious meeting room. There's a spread of coffee,
Speaker 1: juices and biscuits. They make small talk and then they
Speaker 1: get down to business, but it doesn't go well.
Speaker 3: Marsidic was visibly bored.
Speaker 4: He sort of treated as little boys who come up
Speaker 4: with ridiculous, humilitanian crap. Basically said, this was all child's stuff,
Speaker 4: children's stuff, This is too small. I was thinking big projects,
Speaker 4: big industries.
Speaker 3: I mean, basically dismissed what we had done.
Speaker 1: But Marceilllek is excited about something else. He's got a
Speaker 1: video he wants to show Killian.
Speaker 4: I have in German as a guile, I mean exciting
Speaker 4: a video material.
Speaker 1: Gile in this context, I think you'd probably best translators.
Speaker 1: Sexy cool. Marcelex seems pretty psyched up about it. It's
Speaker 1: a video filmed using some new military equipment, body cams
Speaker 1: worn by soldiers, bodycams worn by Wagner the Russian Mercenary Army.
Speaker 1: Marceilek is interested in getting some of these cameras for
Speaker 1: his own purposes. He boasts to Killian that the content
Speaker 1: of the video is shocking.
Speaker 4: Can show it because the boys are killing all the prisoners,
Speaker 4: So it can be used in public.
Speaker 1: Because it's the video is graphic footage of people being murdered.
Speaker 4: Yes, but it's great footage, and so it's pretty basically
Speaker 4: we can show it.
Speaker 3: And I sort of Butt's talked about all this after
Speaker 3: the meeting.
Speaker 1: What were you thinking when he was saying that.
Speaker 3: Or should there's something going on here?
Speaker 1: Killian finally begins to understand that this humanitarian project is
Speaker 1: not at all what it seems. Trying to move things
Speaker 1: on from the video, Killian asks how this relates to
Speaker 1: their work. The answer chills Killian. He says, Marcelett told him.
Speaker 4: What I want really is to convert militia men into borderguards.
Speaker 4: Fifteen twenty thousand something big, and we train and equip them.
Speaker 1: And sid he wants to create a military force in Libya,
Speaker 1: a border guard that would stop migrants crossing into or
Speaker 1: out of Libya. He wants to equip it, and fund
Speaker 1: it and control it.
Speaker 3: That was sort of a key moment where it said
Speaker 3: there's something very wrong.
Speaker 1: Afterwards, Killian replayed that meeting over and over in his head.
Speaker 1: He asked himself, who is Jan Marcelek?
Speaker 3: Really?
Speaker 1: He couldn't come up with a clear answer, and perhaps
Speaker 1: since his invoices were still open, he didn't want to.
Speaker 1: But there was something about the whole situation which made
Speaker 1: him think that Marcelek might not just be a wealthy fantasist,
Speaker 1: that he might be serious about these proposals, and he
Speaker 1: might even have the means to achieve them. He tried
Speaker 1: to ignore that feeling until he couldn't.
Speaker 4: It really sort of clicked completely later that year, October November.
Speaker 1: That's when Killian bumped into a military contact who had
Speaker 1: also been working on the side with Marceilek.
Speaker 3: He tells him, Killian, you know, with Jan one cannot work.
Speaker 3: He's too close to the Russians.
Speaker 4: So from that point onward, yes, and that's late twenty eighteen.
Speaker 4: Here I am with something that I knowed that is
Speaker 4: a lot more to the whole story.
Speaker 1: Killian Kleinschmidt knows he has potentially explosive information about jan Marcelek,
Speaker 1: but Killian also knows he has to be careful. He
Speaker 1: knows Austria well enough now enough to know that Marcelek,
Speaker 1: while somewhat in the shadows, seems to be extremely well connected.
Speaker 1: Months go by, and then in the summer of twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: Killian sees an opportunity to raise the alarm. He's in
Speaker 1: Tunis and he's invited to a garden party at the
Speaker 1: residence of the Austrian ambassador to Libya who's based there.
Speaker 1: He grabs a few minutes with the host and.
Speaker 4: I explained to him the story an Austrian national very
Speaker 4: much doing strange things and Libya and whether there was
Speaker 4: on the radar screen and so on. And when I
Speaker 4: had finished the story, and he said, how you have
Speaker 4: to be careful.
Speaker 3: It could be one of them.
Speaker 1: You have to be careful. I could be one of them.
Speaker 1: Even though this sounds ominous. When I first heard this,
Speaker 1: I took it as a joke. And the ambassador confirmed
Speaker 1: as much to me. He told me he remembers meeting
Speaker 1: Killian but doesn't recall exactly what he said, and that
Speaker 1: making joking remarks sounds like something he'd probably do just
Speaker 1: to try and break the ice. He wanted to make
Speaker 1: clear though, that he didn't and doesn't have a connection
Speaker 1: to Marcelek regardless. Back then, at this party, Killian is
Speaker 1: already feeling nervous and gets the impression he should hold
Speaker 1: his tongue, an impression reinforced when a year later, at
Speaker 1: the same garden party, the ambassador joked again.
Speaker 4: That's when he's said in front of other people and
Speaker 4: saying it, Oh, that's Kleinschmidt. Yeah, I have the instruction
Speaker 4: to not let you out alife. So obviously humor, but
Speaker 4: it was as well kind of menacing, kind of immature.
Speaker 1: I mean, even though it was a joke, there is
Speaker 1: a slight message there for you, isn't there. He's trying
Speaker 1: to tell you something, which is maybe that you're annoying
Speaker 1: or maybe you should shut up.
Speaker 3: But basically yes.
Speaker 1: So from then on, Killian only speaks to one or
Speaker 1: two close friends about Marcelek. He worries that if he
Speaker 1: tells anyone who knows him less well, he might land
Speaker 1: himself in serious trouble or end up sounding like well,
Speaker 1: a bit cracked, another unpaid contractor with an ax to
Speaker 1: grind and a conspiracy to pedal but other events at
Speaker 1: the time, they keep making him a question again and again,
Speaker 1: just what was Marcelek up to. A few months after
Speaker 1: Killian broke off his connection with mars Leg, he moved
Speaker 1: to northern Greece. The borders were closed. Huge numbers of
Speaker 1: migrants were trying to come into Europe from the Levante
Speaker 1: due to the war raging in Syria. Even though Killian's
Speaker 1: officially retired from the UN he'd remained plugged in. Thanks
Speaker 1: to Killian's years of frontline work. His network of sources
Speaker 1: bring him disturbing nuggets of information about the situation. They
Speaker 1: tell him, even though the borders are closed, it seems
Speaker 1: that over and over again, desperate groups of migrants believe otherwise.
Speaker 1: They're being fed lies.
Speaker 4: Through my network, we found out that somehow there were
Speaker 4: rumors spread that Merkel would open the borders again.
Speaker 1: Angela Merkel, Germany's chancellor. At the time, she had already
Speaker 1: accepted hundreds of thousands of migrants into Germany.
Speaker 4: We've found very strong indications in photos of people who
Speaker 4: were in different locations telling that story. And this story
Speaker 4: of it went from northern Iraq, and it was in Turkey,
Speaker 4: it was in the entire region, the sort of go Europe.
Speaker 1: Telling that story to refugees and camps.
Speaker 4: And camps and out of camps already on the move,
Speaker 4: already in Greece and so on. So people have started
Speaker 4: moving in this direction.
Speaker 1: Hospitals are being bombed in Syria at the time by
Speaker 1: the Russians who are fighting alongside their client Basha Asad,
Speaker 1: the country's ruler. They seem to be deliberately worsening the
Speaker 1: humanitarian crisis, and something for Killian falls into place. What
Speaker 1: if the Russians are spreading these lies about open borders
Speaker 1: in Europe too? He makes the leap back to Marsilek.
Speaker 1: What if Marsilek wanted to do something similar in southern Libya,
Speaker 1: to use a force controlling the border to influence migrant flows.
Speaker 1: At first, it all feels too outlandish to him, but
Speaker 1: with time he starts to believe it. For the most part, though,
Speaker 1: he keeps all these suspicions to himself now to fear,
Speaker 1: until the day he spoke to me. When Gillian told
Speaker 1: it to me, it rang Bells. I thought straight away
Speaker 1: of the late US Senator John McCain. He'd said the
Speaker 1: very same thing in twenty sixteen at the Munich Security
Speaker 1: Conference with reference to Syria.
Speaker 7: Mister Putin is not interested in being our partner. He
Speaker 7: wants to shore up the Asad regime. He wants to
Speaker 7: re establish Russia as a major power in the Middle East.
Speaker 7: He wants to use Syria as a live fire exercise
Speaker 7: for Russia's modernizing military, and he wants to exacerbate the
Speaker 7: refugee crisis and use it as a weapon to divide
Speaker 7: the Transit Plantic Alliance and undermine the European Project.
Speaker 1: Russia's interest in weaponizing migration was being taken seriously as
Speaker 1: a threat to NATO by the world's biggest military power,
Speaker 1: the USA. So this idea of Killians that marsilect could
Speaker 1: be working for Russia in Libya to control migration for
Speaker 1: political influence, it's actually not as far fetched as it seems. Then,
Speaker 1: six months after I first met Killian in June twenty twenty, something.
Speaker 8: Happened extraordinary story admission, of course, from payments for wirecard
Speaker 8: this week that the missing two billion dollars may never
Speaker 8: have existed at all.
Speaker 1: After months of tireless reporting by my colleague at the FT,
Speaker 1: Dan McCrumb Wirecard, the fintech giant Marcelect had helped build
Speaker 1: as chief operating officer, the corporate edifice around which he
Speaker 1: had constructed his entire public persona collapsed. Meanwhile, Wire Cards
Speaker 1: auditors are in hot water too.
Speaker 3: E Y says a two point one billion dollar hole
Speaker 3: in the firm's accounts is the result of sophisticated fraud.
Speaker 1: Now Marcus Brown, of course has resigned or has we done?
Speaker 1: On Friday as the CEO of that company.
Speaker 8: The chief operating officer was also sacked over the weekend.
Speaker 1: Once our card exploded, some of the other people involved
Speaker 1: in marcelex Libya scheme they became more talkative, and within
Speaker 1: well just four weeks or so, Killian's crazy tale went
Speaker 1: from being an unprintable conspiracy to an established set of
Speaker 1: facts we could attribute to multiple sources. But I wanted
Speaker 1: to be certain we weren't overinterpreting marcle X's links to
Speaker 1: Russian intelligence, so I went with what we knew to
Speaker 1: one of my most important contacts, I can't really tell
Speaker 1: you about them. That's a condition of me being in
Speaker 1: touch with them. But they work for a European government.
Speaker 1: Let's leave it there. They confirmed what I thought, Marceleck
Speaker 1: really did have ties to Russian spies. Specifically, it seemed
Speaker 1: to the GRU, Russia's fearsome military intelligence agency, the organization
Speaker 1: responsible for the Salisbury poisonings. Killian decided he wanted to
Speaker 1: go public. He outed himself and gave testimony to a
Speaker 1: special committee of the German Parliament investigating Wakaart. Killian doesn't
Speaker 1: regret doing that, but he's also over time become more
Speaker 1: and more convinced that he was right to be afraid.
Speaker 1: His life has never quite been the same. Twice now
Speaker 1: he's been on the edge of financial ruin thanks to
Speaker 1: projects he's gotten involved in which have exploded in his face.
Speaker 1: And he doesn't think it's a coincidence.
Speaker 4: It may not be sort of the extreme sort of
Speaker 4: movie style revenge, but it may be a sort of
Speaker 4: destroy option of guiding me and leading me into traps,
Speaker 4: which is very intelligent if you want to make somebody suffer.
Speaker 4: I was promised things which never happened, and so almost
Speaker 4: by design, and it led to one of the most
Speaker 4: horrible years in my life and being completely destitute.
Speaker 1: In fact, even now he struggles. He keeps being approached
Speaker 1: by odd characters, people connected to Russia, who seemed to
Speaker 1: be trying to lure him into misadventures. For all his experience,
Speaker 1: his bravery, and his force of personality, Killian still ended
Speaker 1: up vulnerable. What Killian revealed about Marcelek was it still
Speaker 1: is wild. But it wasn't the end of the story
Speaker 1: at all. It was really just the beginning. It was
Speaker 1: a revelation that triggered as many questions as it answered.
Speaker 1: Was marcelect working exclusively for the Russians? Was he a
Speaker 1: kind of freelancer? Did the wire card fraud involve Russia too?
Speaker 1: What did Russia want from Marcelek? The obvious person to ask,
Speaker 1: of course, was Marcelec himself, except we couldn't. On June seventeenth,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, with Warkard's management, employees and shareholders still reeling
Speaker 1: from the fact that billions were missing, Jan Marcelek told
Speaker 1: colleagues he was urgently flying to Manila, where the money
Speaker 1: was supposed to have disappeared. He said he was going
Speaker 1: to sort out the mystery and prove Warkard had nothing
Speaker 1: to hide except in reality. He was in a car
Speaker 1: heading across the Alps. It was a beautiful day, hot,
Speaker 1: a clear blue sky, perfect weather to fly. Pad Verslau
Speaker 1: Airport is a small regional airstrip in Austria used mostly
Speaker 1: by amateur aviators. A car pulled up on the tarmac
Speaker 1: that day and outstepped Jan Marcelek. The border checks were
Speaker 1: a formality. No one was really watching down there. Marceleck
Speaker 1: had a suitcase with him. It was full of cash.
Speaker 1: Here's you're fair, he must have told the pilot, next stop, Minsk, Belarus,
Speaker 1: coming up on hot money. The people who were left
Speaker 1: behind trying to make sense of it.
Speaker 5: All, and we walked around and unbelievable. You walk around
Speaker 5: and you see a parallel world and all the explanation
Speaker 5: he had. This room is sound proof. This room is
Speaker 5: got searched every other week by a specialist for microphones
Speaker 5: and surveillance stuff.
Speaker 1: We were flabberg acid, We were speechless.
Speaker 3: It had never happened like that.
Speaker 6: I mean, we were all important people in the company
Speaker 6: that it.
Speaker 3: Was like a persona face. The top ten white collar
Speaker 3: crime of Theory.
Speaker 2: Minas and Financier from Lubishop Vad and Me.
Speaker 1: Hot Money is a production of The Financial Times and
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries. It was written and reported by me Sam Jones.
Speaker 1: The senior producer and co writer is Peggy Sutton. Our
Speaker 1: producer is Izzy Carter. Our researcher is Marine Saint. Our
Speaker 1: show is edited by Karen Shakerji, fact checking by Kira Levigne.
Speaker 1: Sound design and mastering by Jake Gorsky and Marcelo de Olivia,
Speaker 1: with additional sound design by Izy Carter. Original music from
Speaker 1: Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphonet. Our show
Speaker 1: art is by Sean Carney. Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley,
Speaker 1: Amy Gains McQuaid and Matthew Garreher. Additional editing by Paul Murphy.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Ruler Claugh, Dan McCrumb, Laura Clark, Alistair Mackie,
Speaker 1: Manuela Saragosa, Nigel Hanson, Vicki Merrick, Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner,
Speaker 1: Jake Flanagan, Jacob Goldstein, Sarah Nix and Greta Cohne. I'm
Speaker 1: Sam Jones.