By Max Colchester

LONDON -- Vanya Gaberova, a 30-year-old beautician who ran a West London shop called Pretty Woman, was in bed with a naked, fellow-Bulgarian spy in February 2023 when British police smashed down the front door of her apartment.

The raven-haired Gaberova told a British court that, faced with balaclava-clad cops, she began to cry and turned to her lover, Bizer Dzhambazov, asking him in Bulgarian, "What have you done?"

Across England that day, some 100 British police entered four other properties and arrested five Bulgarian nationals on suspicion of spying for the Kremlin. Another Bulgarian was arrested a year later. British prosecutors say the spy ring was led by disgraced Austrian financier Jan Marsalek, who fled to Moscow following the 2020 collapse of his company Wirecard in a $2 billion fraud and works for Russian intelligence.

On Friday, three Bulgarians including Gaberova were found guilty of spying for Russia and will be sentenced at a later date. They had denied the charges, saying they didn't realize they were working for the Russian state.

Dzhambazov and two other men had already pleaded guilty to conspiring to spy. Marsalek wasn't charged because he is believed by British officials to be living in Russia and wasn't charged in absentia.

The convictions capped a monthslong trial in a cramped London court that offered a rare window into how Russian espionage across Europe has changed in recent years, after hundreds of Russian diplomats, including scores of spies, were expelled by European countries following the 2014 annexation of Crimea and again after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

In this case, Moscow adapted in part by outsourcing the spying to a loose network of largely untrained foreign nationals. For Russia, it offered a low-cost alternative and the possibility of plausible deniability that it was behind the Bulgarians.

The result, according to testimony during the trial, was a spy ring that was equal parts Keystone Kops and KGB.

Prosecutors outlined six plots by the spy group, most of which didn't ultimately succeed or were disrupted by the investigation. They included trying to snoop on a U.S. military base in Germany, as well as plans to kidnap and kill Russian dissidents and a leading Bulgarian investigative journalist, Christo Grozev, who exposed members of the Russian secret service who were allegedly behind the poisoning of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

British prosecutors said the spy ring was running covert operations in places including Vienna, London, Montenegro and in Stuttgart, Germany, and Valencia, Spain. "This was spying on an industrial scale," said Dominic Murphy, the head of the London Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command.

The spy group -- which included a decorator, a mixed-martial-arts fighter and two lab technicians -- gave themselves code names including Jean-Claude Van Damme, Jackie Chan and Mad Max. They amassed dozens of high-end surveillance devices, including Coke bottles with hidden cameras and a stuffed Minions toy with a camera buried inside.

British prosecutors say Marsalek ran the spy ring from 2020 to 2023. To coordinate the team, he used an old acquaintance named Orlin Roussev, a Bulgarian based in a rundown seaside town in eastern England. When police arrested Roussev, they found his phone filled with hundreds of emoji-strewn messages to Marsalek, brainstorming ideas.

Despite being one of the most wanted criminals in the world and hiding in Moscow, Marsalek was able in 2021 to open a company in the U.K. in his own name and funnel cash and crypto through bank accounts to pay his agents. British police found that around 200,000 euros (around $217,000) was paid through accounts connected to Roussev, who was among the three who pleaded guilty to conspiring to spy.

Marsalek and Roussev worked to sell a stolen U.S. Switchblade drone to Chinese officials, who wanted to reverse-engineer them. They brainstormed how to make a deepfake porn video of the president of Kazakhstan's son to stir discontent in the nation so its leadership would turn to Russia for help.

Other plots were more sinister. The spy ring was rolled up just before a plan went into action to send the Bulgarians to sit outside a U.S. military base in Stuttgart, with police-grade equipment that could steal information from the cellphones of Ukrainian servicemen being trained at the base to operate Patriot missile defense batteries. The aim was to track the servicemen back to Ukraine and geolocate where the Patriot missiles were being fired from, presumably allowing Russian forces to destroy them.

The group also surveilled two journalists, including Grozev, and discussed plans to spirit them away to Russia or kill Grozev on behalf of the Russian special services. Grozev has since fled to the U.S. from Vienna. His family in Austria receives round-the-clock security from the state whenever he visits.

As well as surveillance, Dzhambazov tasked Gaberova with striking up a friendship with Grozev, whom she friended on Facebook, in an ultimately failed bid to entrap him.

"We could definitely record something for Pornhub. The girl is really hot," Roussev wrote to Marsalek, referring to Gaberova.

Marsalek wasn't so sure. "I hope she does not fall in love with him. I had that problem before with a honeytrap," he replied.

Prosecutors said the group also targeted a dissident Russian lawyer. "We don't mind if he dies by accident, but better if he manages to find his way to Moscow," Marsalek wrote as he laid out the terms of the operation, according to copies of the messages presented in court.

While the Russian lawyer wasn't seized, the spy ring's work allowed someone described as his boss to be exfiltrated later from Montenegro by a Russian black-ops team, according to the messages. "Apparently it was like in the movies," Marsalek wrote. "They came into the flight and told him he has the choice to come with them without a fight or they shoot him in front of his daughter." British officials declined to comment on the identity of the person who was seized.

Ultimately, the network collapsed because it couldn't cover its tracks, British police say. The untrained agents failed to delete their phone messages and took selfies while on surveillance missions.

It was also hamstrung by an HR disaster: Nearly all its agents were sleeping with each other, according to court testimony. Dzhambazov was living with his longtime girlfriend, Katrin Ivanova, a 33-year-old lab technician, when he began an affair with Gaberova. Ivanova was also convicted of conspiring on Friday. Gaberova, meanwhile, had been dating another member of the group.

Gaberova said in court that Dzhambazov had told her he worked for Interpol, and that she undertook espionage operations thinking she was doing so for a legitimate police force. Ivanova said she thought she was tracking criminals as a favor to help her boyfriend.

Dzhambazov attempted to explain his long absences to his two lovers by falsely claiming he had to travel abroad to get treatment for terminal cancer. (Gaberova said Dzhambazov sent her pictures of himself outside a hospital with what appeared to be toilet paper wrapped around his head).

As he was pulled out of bed with Gaberova that morning in north London, his girlfriend Ivanova was at work. She said she only subsequently learned of Dzhambazov's infidelity.

It was "not a good day for him," said Murphy, the head of the London Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command.

Write to Max Colchester at Max.Colchester@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 08, 2025 08:00 ET (13:00 GMT)

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