October 19, 2021 in Berlin. It was a cloudy morning and the temperature wasn’t reaching 10 degrees when the man was found on the sidewalk.
At 7:20 a.m., the body of the 35-year-old employee of the Russian embassy in Berlin was found. Apparently he fell out the window. Or been overthrown. Or has it been discarded? Cause of death: unclear. Exact time of death: also.
The dead man in front of the Russian embassy: German security authorities believe that he was an agent of the Kremlin! His name: Kirill A. Zhalo. On June 14, 2019, he and his wife Alexandra were accredited as a diplomat by the Federal Foreign Office. But he is considered by the German security services as a “legendary”, that is, a camouflaged spy.
Zhalo is not just anyone: his father Alexey is a lieutenant general of the Russian domestic intelligence service FSB. The dead person in front of the embassy: the son of one of the country’s highest-ranking intelligence officers. Zhalo’s father is responsible for “wet things” – for murders in the name of the Kremlin! Responsible, among other things, for the murder in the Kleiner Tiergarten in Berlin in 2019 – a few weeks after son Kirill started his official job as second embassy secretary in Berlin.
It is a thriller that the “Spiegel” reported first yesterday: The Berlin police cannot initiate a death investigation. The embassy blocks. The body is quickly removed from the country.
What remains are questions: Accident? Suicide? Kremlin murder? Or revenge on your father and his boss, Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin?
►The trial of the contract killing in the Kleiner Tiergarten is still pending before the Berlin regional court: On August 23, 2019, a Kremlin contract killer shot a Georgian citizen in the middle of Berlin. Responsible for it: Zhalo’s father. The murder was secured and prepared: by a team of agents and employees of the embassy where Kirill Zhalo worked as an agent.
The father is also held responsible for carrying out the poisonous murders (with the poison Novichok) on the KGB defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, UK in 2018, the attempted murder of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny and a series of murders against Chechens in exile in Western Europe.
A suspicion by western investigators: son Kyrill could have been killed in revenge. From a foreign secret service. Consciously in front of the Russian embassy! – or even in it! Clear message: We’ll get you – even where you feel safe!
AGENT WAR IN THE MIDDLE OF BERLIN?
The city has been the agent capital for more than 100 years. Especially during the Cold War.
World famous: Agents were exchanged on the Glienicke Bridge between Berlin-Wannsee and Potsdam during the Cold War (film: “Bridge of Spies”).
In GDR times, Berlin-Karlshorst was the western headquarters of the notorious KGB: From there, work was carried out in the GDR and, above all, against the West. Most of the papers that today’s Kremlin ruler Vladimir Putin (69) once sent as a KGB agent from Dresden to his “Directorate S” in Moscow also ended up there.
The Moscow agents went into hiding in Potsdam in the chaos of the Wende: until 1994 they were camouflaged as the western group of the Soviet armed forces – they also organized the reorganization there, pulled the strings for many of their cadre’s political and economic careers in the unified Germany.
Since then, the Kremlin network has been operating covertly through companies, institutes, associations and think tanks. The old KGB structures: today largely privatized.
Experts assume there are 3000 to 5000 active or “sleeping” agents, sources and influencers of the Russians in Germany! Among them: many “illegals” who were smuggled into both parts of Germany during the Soviet era (almost 100 each / year): Agents – can be activated if necessary. Active attention, for example, when trying to expand the Pegida movement from Dresden to Potsdam. Others as extras in staged fairy tales of the Russian media (“Case Lisa”).
More than 300 Russians work in the embassy in Berlin – 25 percent are agents.
Spies keep flying up:
►A few weeks ago the Attorney General arrested a small employee of the British embassy in Potsdam. He had passed documents on.
►In June, Ilnur Nagaev, a scientist who is said to have spied for the Kremlin, was arrested in Augsburg.
►At the end of October, Jens F., an ex-Stasi man, was convicted for passing construction documents from the Bundestag to the GRU military intelligence service.
Photo: EAST2WEST NEWS
“data-zoom-src =” https://bilder.bild.de/fotos/spionierte-fuer-den-kreml-und-posierte-vor-der-russen-botschaft-david-smith-aus-potsdam-wurde- im-aug-46c730b1a78a4418bc9be890ec4dd6e1-78165444 / image / 6.image.jpg “/> Spied for the Kremlin and posed in front of the Russian embassy: David Smith from Potsdam was arrested in AugustPhoto: EAST2WEST NEWS
►For years, US services have observed at least two senior civil servants close to Angela Merkel who are suspected of being Moscow’s influencers. One was transferred.
Other spies in Berlin allow Western services to work in a targeted manner or feed them with false information, and follow the routes taken by stolen documents and information. For years, for example, an employee of the Left parliamentary group carried secret documents from an investigative committee of the Bundestag directly into the Russian embassy.
Foto: AFP via Getty Images
“data-zoom-src =” https://bilder.bild.de/fotos/agenten-nest-aus-der-russischen-botschaft-in-berlin-heraus-wird-auch-das-regierungsviertel-abgehoert-12fc178f63b44b7e86d499545d4fc23c- 78165330 / Bild / 6.bild.jpg “/> Agent nest: The government district is also bugged from the Russian embassy in Berlin. It is better not to discuss anything confidential while walking …Foto: AFP via Getty Images
Moscow is so deeply rooted in Berlin that it is no longer just about pure espionage. Many agents are now deployed to secure the hidden property of the Putin clique. Because the wives of the defense minister, for example, and senior Kremlin and secret service cadres have invested millions in Berlin, Munich and Hamburg via covert channels, according to German security authorities. In Berlin, for example, in well-known shopping malls.
But above all the sources of income of the Kremlin have to be protected from Berlin: for example the refinery in Schwedt (Rosneft) and the pipelines Nord Stream 1 and 2 along with the pipelines through Germany. Because: nowhere does the Kremlin earn more with gas and oil than in the west – and above all in Germany. In the greater Berlin area, almost 90 percent of petrol comes from Kremlin refineries. Important managers in the gas and oil empire of the Kremlin and its secret services: Ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (SPD) and his close confidante, Putin’s friend and ex-Stasi agent Matthias Warnig.
And if you want to talk about secrets undisturbed, you shouldn’t do so in Berlin near the Unter den Linden boulevard – it’s not just the Russian secret services who are listening in from the embassy …