Like all the best teams of undercover agents, the Great Yarmouth guesthouse spy ring comprised individuals with very different skillsets.
There was the expert in hidden gadgets, busily dreaming up ways to conceal cameras in Coke bottles, the shaven-headed enforcer known as The Rock and the smouldering ‘killer sexy brunette’ ready to be deployed in honeytrap stings.
As for the puppet master, he was a mysterious businessman on the run from Interpol, now holed up in Moscow doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin.
For almost three years the group passed secrets to Russia, travelling across Europe to spy on enemies of the Kremlin, journalists and Ukrainian troops training at a US air base.
In that time they plotted how to kidnap their targets – even discussing how to murder them if they could not bring their victims back to Moscow alive.
And all backed up by an ‘Aladdin’s Cave’ of sophisticated technology including a £120,000 device for intercepting mobile phone numbers, a fleet of drones and dozens of fake passports.
That there were farcical moments along the way there can be no doubt. At one point a surveillance team visited a zoo to look at polar bears when they should have been hot on the tail of a target. Another stakeout was interrupted by a trip to Harrods. As for their sexual shenanigans, even James Bond might have raised a quizzical eyebrow at all the bed-hopping.
But at the same time there is no doubting the threat they – and others like them – pose to the security of the West.
Biser Dzhambazov and Vanya Gaberova pose for a selfie in this picture that was shown to the jury at the Old Bailey
Vanya Gaberova, 30, has been found guilty of spying for Russia at the Old Bailey
Decorator Tihomir Ivanchev, 39, (left) and Orlin Roussev, 46, (right) were both accused of being part of the ring. Roussev pled guilty at an earlier date
‘This was spying on an almost industrial scale on behalf of Russia,’ observed Scotland Yard commander Dominic Murphy whose investigation into the espionage ring is the largest he has been involved with in two decades of fighting terrorism. ‘It felt like something you would expect to read in a spy novel. This is not something we see very often.’
At the Old Bailey following a three-month trial, beautician Vanya Gaberova, 30, decorator Tihomir Ivanchev, 39, and lab technician Katrin Ivanova, 33, were found guilty of conspiring to spy for Russia.
Their handler, Orlin Roussev, 46, his lieutenant, Biser Dzhambazov, 43, and Ivan Stoyanov, 32, had already pleaded guilty to charges under the Official Secrets Act.
They will be sentenced at a later date but the six Bulgarian nationals are now facing lengthy jail sentences.
Their deployment by Russia marks a new chapter in an age-old game.
In the years before the 2018 Novichok nerve agent attack in Salisbury, any Russian espionage on British soil was run by highly-trained operatives working directly for their intelligence agencies such as the GRU or FSB.
Following the incident, Britain expelled 23 Russian diplomats identified as undeclared intelligence officers, while 100 Russian diplomat visa applications have since been denied on national security grounds.
It means Russian intelligence agencies have had to turn to other methods to carry out covert plots, often using proxy groups to do their dirty work.
These include migrants tempted by the offer of cash – so-called ‘misfits’ who are viewed by their handlers as relatively expendable.
The agents all face lengthy jail terms when they are sentenced. Pictured: Gaberova’s custody photo
Katrin Ivanova was also accused of being part of a network of spies targeting people and places of interest to the Russian state
Ivan Stoyanov, 32, pleaded guilty to the charges under the Official Secrets Act
Ivan Stoyanov, 32, had already pleaded guilty to the charges under the Official Secrets Act
Pictured: The Haydee Hotel guest house in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, where the spy ring operated from
Inside three of the 33 rooms of the guest house was a ‘significant amount of IT and surveillance equipment’
Police also found 11 drones, 221 mobile phones and 75 fake passports at Roussev’s guesthouse
Fugitive businessman Jan Marsalek (pictured in his passport photo) was the financer of the operations
A fake Belgian passport in the name of Alexandre Schmidt, with a photograph of Jan Marsalek
An Interpol red notice issued at the request of Germany in August 2020 for spy Jan Marsalek
A Slovenian ID card in the name of Marko Humar, with a photo of spy chief Orlin Roussev
The British ring was run by Austrian businessman Jan Marsalek.
The grandson of a Soviet spy, Marsalek’s own story is worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster.
The 44-year-old was an executive at German tech giant Wirecard and has been on the run since the firm collapsed in 2020 amid a £1.6bn fraud.
Marsalek is thought to have first been brought into Russian intelligence circles by a GRU officer after the pair met on a yacht at his girlfriend’s birthday party in the south of France.
After absconding, he was offered sanctuary by the Kremlin, travelling to Moscow on a passport belonging to a priest from the Russian Orthodox church.
The fugitive businessman delighted in his new role as a spy handler, exchanging 80,000 messages and hundreds of thousands of pounds with Orlin Roussev, the UK boss of the spy ring.
Roussev, a Porsche-driving Bulgarian, described himself as ‘Q branch’ because his skills creating surveillance devices were as impressive as James Bond’s famous quartermaster.
He moved to Britain in 2009, initially working in a technical role in financial services.
But Roussev’s LinkedIn profile states he later owned a business in signals intelligence, involving the interception of communications. It is believed he first had contact with Marsalek through Wirecard.
In 2021, Roussev moved from London to an unremarkable seaside guesthouse in Great Yarmouth, which was purchased for £220,000 by his partner.
This picture of Vanya Gaberova wearing spy glasses was shown to the jury at the Old Bailey
Image shows a Coca Cola bottle that was seized as part of the investigation
Bulgarian national Dzhambazov, 43, previously admitted to spying in the UK on behalf of Russia
Dzhambazov, seen dressed in military uniform, was one of six found guilty on Friday
Police officers found an array of fake military uniform at the home of Dzhambazov
Police camera footage shows Ivanchev being interviewed by police after his arrest
A photo of a fake Dzhambazov press ID card shown to the jury during the trial
A surveillance image of Christo Grozev, whose work uncovering the men behind the Salisbury nerve agent attack made him a target for the Kremlin, and Roman Dobrokhotov
There he set about creating an ‘Indiana Jones warehouse’ of spy gadgetry in three of the bedrooms. Among his inventions were a two-litre Coca-Cola bottle containing a hidden camera, a computer mouse with hidden listening device and a cuddly toy ‘minion’ from the Hollywood film complete with concealed camera.
It was something of an in-joke – Roussev always referred to his underlings as his ‘minions’.
The ring’s second in command, who Roussev met through friends, was laboratory worker Biser Dzhambazov, who called himself ‘Mad Max’ and coordinated things on the ground.
Roussev sent at least £173,000 to Dzhambazov, who kept £95,000 for himself and paid the rest to other members of the spy ring – including £37,000 to his partner Katrin Ivanova.
He was ten years older than Ivanova, having met the then-teenage secretarial assistant at a double-glazing firm in Sofia where he worked.
In 2012 they moved to Britain, setting up home in Harrow, northwest London, where they ran a community project called the Bulgarian Social Platform, ostensibly to help their countrymen integrate into the UK.
Dzhambazov told members of the group he had been a policeman in his homeland, and provided free English lessons and electronic tablets to Bulgarians who were settling in Britain.
‘Bulgarians living abroad normally advise you to stay away from other Bulgarians – because they will normally try to f*** you,’ a former member of the project told the Mail.
‘And now I wonder if the Bulgarian Social Network was just a way of recruiting other people to spy with them.’
The agents used hi-tech equipment to try and track Ukrainian servicemen training at US airbase Patch Barracks in Stuttgart (Pictured: A minion camera seized by police)
Pictured: Fake press cards belonging to Gaberova and Ivanchev that were shown to the jury during the trial
A neighbour recalled strange goings-on with satellite dishes, saying: ‘I do remember that they had theirs pointed in a different direction to all the other ones. At one stage, he had a friend around and they tried to mount a massive one on the wall. But it would have blocked out the light into my flat and so we had words about that and it didn’t happen.’
For ladies’ man Dzhambazov, deceit would feature in both his private and professional life.
In July 2021 he started cheating on his partner after meeting the glamorous Vanya Gaberova at a polling station in a west London hotel ahead of the Bulgarian national elections. He would first woo her and then recruit her and her boyfriend to join the spy ring.
Originally from a rural village in south-western Bulgaria, Gaberova was obsessed with her looks.
‘She was always childish and naïve, and when I first heard about the spying accusations I thought she won’t have understood what she got herself into,’ her aunt told this paper.
Gaberova moved to Britain with her decorator boyfriend Tihomir Ivanchev in 2017.
She spoke very little English so while working in her first salon communicated using short phrases he wrote down for her in advance.
He then took out a £25,000 loan to allow Gaberova to open her own salon in Acton, west London, named Pretty Woman.
There she would go on to win a string of accolades, including a competition at the International Beauty Awards 2020 that saw her crowned ‘Queen of the Lashes’.
Gaberova told the court how Dzhambazov charmed her, telling her he worked for Interpol and even flashing an official-looking ID card. She claimed she was just a naive beautician whose judgment was clouded by love.
Dzhambazov would take his new love interest for lavish meals and to trendy nightspots, before manipulating surveillance trips abroad to ensure he could spend time with her away from the oblivious Ivanova. Because unlike Gaberova, who dumped her boyfriend, Dzhambazov continued to juggle the two women in his life.
Spies Katrin Ivanova (left) and Vanya Gaberova (right) seen in an artist’s illustration during an earlier appearance at Westminster Magistrates court via videolink
In a bid to explain away the time he spent with his long-term partner, Dzhambazov resorted to duping Gaberova into thinking he had cancer.
To maintain the story, he even sent her a selfie of himself with toilet paper wrapped round his head to give the appearance of bandages, taken in a hospital while he was at a routine appointment.
The final member of the ‘minions’ was Stoyanov, the heavyweight mixed martial arts fanatic from Greenford, west London, nicknamed ‘The Rock,’ who worked at the same laboratory as Dzhambazov.
The ‘muscle’ of the operation, he had grown up in a tower block in Bulgaria’s capital and was a successful mixed martial arts champion.
The team would bring their various talents together in six carefully-planned operations.
One high profile target was Christo Grozev, a 64-year-old investigative journalist whose work uncovering Russian links to the Salisbury attack and the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny had riled the Kremlin.
The spies discussed snaring the married Bulgarian journalist with a ‘honeytrap’ plot, with Gaberova instructed to send him a Facebook request, which he accepted.
Roussev excitedly sent a message to his boss in Moscow announcing that the ploy was working.
‘Grozev seems hooked and in love with Vanya,’ Roussev wrote. ‘We could start moving slowly towards a romance. We could definitely record something for Pornhub [a pornography website]. The girl is really hot. She is a swinger too…Vanya is very, very assertive and strongly independent … a true sexy bitch.’
The group duly followed Grozev to Vienna, Valencia and Montenegro, taking pictures of whoever he met, setting up surveillance outside his flat and opening his mail.
In June 2022, Ivanova even used video surveillance spectacles to film Grozev on a Wizz Air flight from Vienna to Montenegro.
And that same month, the spies broke into his apartment and stole an old laptop.
It was during this trip to Vienna that Ivanchev, who said he had been told the trip would be like ‘a paid holiday,’ took a break from tailing Grozev to look at African elephants, polar bears and rare Chinese pandas at the local zoo.
At one point Roussev offered to have the journalist kidnapped, drugged and then brought to Russia in the same way a high profile Nazi was extracted by Israeli operatives in 1960.
Bulgarian national Bizer Dzhambazov, 43, had already admitted to spying in the UK on behalf of Russia
A screengrab from the social media network Telegram of Biser Dzhambazov, wearing what appears to be loo roll on his head, while on a video call with Vanya Gaberova
A handout photo issued by Met Police of the Jewish Museum in Vienna, where the spy ring planned to post Nazi Ukrainian stickers
‘The idea of the Israelis kidnapping Adolf Eichmann is good inspirational material,’ he told Marsalek. ‘We will need a plane or a boat.’ The plan was not proceeded with.
Another operation focused on a UK-based Russian dissident saw the spies discuss how to kidnap their target and place him onto a boat in an operation which would make up for the ‘f*** up’ of the failed Skripal poisoning.
They also considered poisoning the man with ricin, firing a poison dart at him from a drone or using a Coke can booby-trapped with nerve gas.
A third operation – Operation Two Castles – was launched against a former Kazakhstan politician granted refugee status in Britain. It involved carrying out surveillance on the man’s two properties in Kensington and Knightsbridge.
Their proximity to Harrods did not go unnoticed by Gaberova – who duly left her post for a spot of retail therapy.
Patch Barracks in Stuttgart, a US airbase where the spies believed Ukrainian soldiers were being taken for training, was also targeted.
The group used hi-tech equipment to try to track the servicemen back to Ukraine with the aim of then determining the locations of batteries of US Patriot missiles.
Roussev came across a Daily Mail story about a Parachute Regiment orgy at a British barracks and suggested sending prostitutes into the base to gather information. Having agreed a £34,000-a-month budget for the project, surveillance of the base was carried out, with the operation only halted by the timely intervention of the British authorities to arrest the spies.
Screen grab taken from police body cam showing the arrest of spy chief Orlin Roussev in Great Yarmouth in 2023
Spy chief Roussev shown during the moment of his arrest at his Great Yarmouth home in 2023
At least £200,000 was sent by the group’s Moscow-based handler, fugitive businessman Jan Marsalek, to finance the operations, which were planned over 80,000 messages exchanged with Roussev (pictured during his arrest) over Telegram
A wider shot of the scene of Roussev’s arrest shows special equipment used for his activities
Mobile phones found by police inside a safe at a property occupied by Biser Dzhambazov and Katrin Ivanova in High Road, Harrow
Footage shows Tihomir Ivanov Ivanchev speaking to a police officer outside the home of his ex-girlfriend Vanya Gaberova the day after she was arrested
When armed police raided Roussev’s guesthouse on 7 February, 2023, his calm response did not go unnoticed.
‘I think this is the wrong place,’ a sighing Roussev was filmed saying as an officer pushed him up against a wall.
But the 2,000 items of evidence seized from the property clearly indicated they had hit the jackpot – as did discoveries at the other addresses raided.
When police burst in to a flat in Euston the following day, they found Dzhambazov and his lover Gaberova naked in bed together.
Ivanova was held soon after – and suffered the indignity of only learning about her partner’s infidelity from a police statement after she was arrested.
Ironically, the damning evidence that sealed the spies’ fates was gathered from the devices of the agent who demonstrated the most formidable tradecraft – Roussev had failed to delete the thousands of messages he exchanged with Marsalek.
Ivanchev was the final member of the group to be arrested and was described as ‘incredibly cooperative’ with police, immediately surrendering his phone for examination.
As his barrister told the court, during his interrogation he ‘sung like Justin Bieber, like a canary.’
He claimed that Dzhambazov had told him he was an Interpol agent and asked him to help.
When asked by the police if he thought he was ‘chasing bad guys’, Ivanchev replied ‘yes’, before adding: ‘This is the dumbest thing I’ve done in my life.’
An observation that others like him and his fellow spies, living double lives in Briain and in the pay of the Kremlin, would do well to consider.
-Additional reporting by Duncan Gardham
