Egisto Ott is not any James Bond. However the tales the 63-year-old Austrian advised a Viennese jury just lately would make just right plotlines. Ott labored as an intelligence officer in Austria’s now-defunct Federal Administrative center for the Coverage of the Charter and Counterterrorism. He was once additionally moonlighting for the Russians.
Prosecutors say Ott, who was once sentenced to 4 years in jail on Would possibly 20, passed over knowledge to fellow Austrian Jan Marsalek, the fugitive former government of the collapsed bills company Wirecard. Marsalek ran a cellular of Bulgarians who had been convicted in London in 2025 of spying for Russia. They referred to as themselves the “minions”.
In 2023, the London Metropolitan police in cooperation with MI5 secured chat messages between Marsalek and the minions, which ended in Ott. It grew to become out Ott had supplied delicate knowledge on dissidents, investigative newshounds and a Russian intelligence defector. The trial additionally published that Ott had acquired the notorious “canoe-trip-mobiles”.
In 2017, high-ranking Austrian civil servants went on a canoe travel in a tributary of the Danube River. They controlled to fall into the water and had their telephones despatched in for maintenance. Their cellular knowledge was once copied by way of Ott and due to this fact ended up in Moscow, along side Marsalek’s favorite Viennese chocolate cake, a Sachertorte. Consistent with the chat messages, the minions had a worrying time discovering the right kind one (there are rival Sachertorte recipes).
Egisto Ott in a court in Vienna on Would possibly 20.
APA-Photographs / Alamy
What seems like a comic book opera has a sinister backstory. For the reason that Fifties, Austria has hosted a number of global organisations which might be ceaselessly centered by way of intelligence services and products. Those come with Opec (the Group of Petroleum Exporting Nations), the World Atomic Power Company and the United International locations Administrative center on Medicine and Crime.
Then again, Austria’s recognition as a spying hub dates again even longer. The Austrian capital, Vienna, was once recognized for espionage earlier than and after the second one international struggle. Arnold Deutsch, the recruiter of the Cambridge 5 secret agent ring that handed knowledge to the Soviet Union, hailed from Vienna. Its main mild, Kim Philby, was once additionally talent-spotted by way of Soviet intelligence within the town in 1933.
However Vienna was once by no means only a playground for Soviet intelligence. After the struggle, when town was once divided into 4 sectors for allied career, the United Kingdom’s international intelligence provider, MI6, began its maximum inventive chilly struggle operations. Peter Lunn, head of MI6’s Vienna station, constructed listening stations within the town to faucet Soviet telephone traces.
He concealed his listening tunnels beneath bizarre stores within the British zone. The primary tunnel was once constructed underneath a police station. Later, MI6 constructed some other tunnel underneath a jewelry store after which put in intelligence officials posing as a tender, wealthy couple in a Viennese villa. Whilst they had been partying upstairs, their colleagues listened in to Russian army site visitors downstairs.
The one surviving witness of a listening station these days is Sir Rodric Braithwaite, whom I first interviewed in 2024. As a 19-year-old conscript, Braithwaite labored with British Military Box Safety within the Aspang listening station, subsequent to the Aspang Bahnhof (a teach station at the outskirts of Vienna).
It wasn’t an uplifting enjoy. He sat there for lengthy shifts with earphones on, dealing with previous apparatus and urgent recording buttons. However his recollections of the tunnel are treasured as a result of to this present day MI6 has now not launched any footage, let by myself recordings, that had been made right through those operations.
The 3rd Guy
They’ve additionally now not published the main points of some other extremely inventive intelligence operation. In 1948, a British staff arrived in Vienna to movie The 3rd Guy, a mystery set within the town. They had been desperate to shoot scenes within the Soviet sector.
4 key other people concerned within the making of the movie had been running for
British intelligence: novelist Graham Greene, director Carol Reed, “Austria advisor” Elizabeth Montagu and, most significantly, manufacturer Sir Alexander Korda. Korda’s movie manufacturing corporate were offering covers for British intelligence officials in Europe for the reason that Nineteen Thirties.
Whether or not the filming of The 3rd Guy was once hooked up to Lunn’s tapping operations, or whether or not MI6 needed to smuggle one thing out of the Soviet sector, is an issue of conjecture. However “odd people” gave the impression at the set.
The director of The 3rd Guy, Carol Reed, in Amsterdam in January 1950.
Jack de Nijs / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
The movie’s sound engineer, Jack Davies, remembered a British technician who grew to become up all of a sudden. After filming, the technician vanished utterly and Davies by no means got here throughout him once more – one thing moderately bizarre within the small international of British movie technicians.
The script lady, Angela Allen, who I first interviewed for my e book Das Haus am Gordon Position (Vienna ‘48) in 2024, additionally realised that one thing abnormal was once happening. She spotted that Carol Reed was once underneath monumental rigidity in Vienna and saved himself wide awake with Benzedrine. He stopped taking the drug after they had been again in England, filming in London studios.
Allen, who’s 97 now, wasn’t stunned to determine years later that Korda was once running for the British intelligence services and products. She advised me: “He had enormous charm. He could make his people do everything for him.”
In all probability this is one explanation why Ott and Marsalek failed. To be triumphant as a secret agent in Vienna, you want to be an excellent illusionist like Alexander Korda.
