New details
Russian spy disguised himself as a journalist in Vienna
The Russian Ivan Popov has been active in Vienna in recent years and is believed to have spied diligently for the secret service under the guise of being a correspondent for the Russian state news agency TASS. It has now become known that he apparently also pulled this stunt in Slovenia.
"Popov did not publish much, but he gradually moved closer to the highest political circles in Slovenia," the Slovenian daily newspaper "Dnevnik" describes him. He had been working in the country since spring 2018. The reason for his arrival was probably the announcement of early parliamentary elections in April.
He had written about events in which representatives of Prime Minister Marjan Sarec's center-left government, which was formed after the elections, also took part. In September 2019, Popov conducted an interview with the then Slovenian head of government, which TASS published before his visit to Moscow.
The foreign intelligence service SWR
- Employees disguise themselves as diplomats or journalists
- Operations under false names and with fabricated biographies
- Fields of activity: Politics, business, science, technology
- Activities and working methods of other intelligence services are to be investigated = counter-intelligence
- Central headquarters: Yassenovo near Moscow
Hardly any reports from the coronavirus era
In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Popov published less and less. The last report from Slovenia was published by TASS on its website in May 2021, according to "Dnevnik". According to the newspaper, it is not possible to reconstruct in detail what the Russian did in the following two years from the TASS reports. In 2023, he finally became a TASS correspondent from Vienna.
TASS
- Russian news agency with headquarters in Moscow (state-owned company)
- Has a network of domestic and foreign offices
- Collaborates with the central propaganda organ of North Korea
Secret dossier warns of Russian "journalists"
The big shock came last March: a six-page secret dossier on the Kremlin's espionage activities in Austria was leaked to the "Falter" newspaper. It warned that TASS employees were also spying in Austria under journalistic cover. It stated that there was a TASS correspondent who "has been working in Vienna since 2023 and is actually an employee of the Russian foreign intelligence service SWR".
Austria reacted, Moscow retaliated
The Alpine republic subsequently withdrew Popov's accreditation, as well as that of his TASS colleague Arina Davidyan, who also works in Vienna. The official reason given by the Austrian authorities was that this was "due to a negative security assessment".
Revenge from Moscow was not long in coming - ORF foreign correspondent Maria Knips-Witting had to leave Russia. The journalist had been in Moscow since the beginning of 2024 and reported from there.
This article has been automatically translated,
read the original article here.
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