Ott’s arrest came several years after intelligence was first shared with Austria by Western partner services —allegedly the Central Intelligence Agency— that reportedly date from as early as November 2017. Back then, Ott allegedly received classified material from his service’s email address to his personal Gmail account. However, Peter Gridling, director of the BVT from 2008 until its dissolution in 2021, stated in a recent interview that the ensuing investigations did not yield actionable results that could be used in criminal proceedings. This statement is highly interesting, as Gridling filed accusations about Ott with the State Prosecutor’s Office himself, and would hardly have done unless he had access to hard evidence. Ott was consequently removed from the BVT and placed in Police Academy Austria (SIAK), which is responsible for training police officers and conducts research related to police and domestic security.

Nevertheless, according to media reporting, Ott seems to have kept and illegally used certain forms of identification that presented him as a police officer. He is also alleged to have maintained access to several police databases and to have retained his network of trusted informants that provided him with intelligence. These included contacts in friendly foreign police services, whom Ott knew from his time as a liaison officer in Italy and Turkey. According to Gridling, these contacts were unaware that Ott had been removed from the BVT under suspicion of being unreliable and potentially even working for Russia. They therefore continued to help him when asked. Ott allegedly deceived his contacts by claiming that he needed information on cases relating to different kinds of extremism. As it turned out, according to the leaked arrest warrant, several of the individuals referred to by Ott as “suspects” in terrorism investigations were in fact Russian dissidents or intelligence defectors who were living as protected persons in Austria and elsewhere outside Russia.

It appears highly probable that Ott also had people inside the Austrian bureaucracy, including former colleagues in the BVT, who continued to provide him with information and assistance, even after the first allegations against him arose in 2017. As of now, at least one other officer from LVT Vienna (the state unit of the BVT) has been found to have illegally provided Ott with Information. It is likely, given the publicly available descriptions of Ott’s activities, that other individuals may be implicated. It also remains to be seen whether individuals involved in this case were able to join the BVT’s successor agency, the new Directorate of State Protection and Intelligence (DSN).

Austrian authorities first arrested Ott in 2021, accusing him of illegally accessing intelligence information and revealing state secrets. However, they released him after the court determined that the legal justification for a pre-trial detention (Untersuchungshaft), especially the risk of collusion and the risk of Ott committing a crime if not detained, were not valid. This seems to have been a misjudgment. Ott’s most recent arrest came following the sharing of evidence by British authorities, who obtained online chats between Jan Maršálek and Orlin Roussev, the suspected leader of a Russian spy-ring. Alongside other evidence in the case, these chats allegedly prove that Ott provided assistance in locating the residence of Christo Grozev, a Bulgarian investigative journalist, who lived in Vienna at the time. Subsequently, burglars stole a laptop and at least one memory stick from Grozev’s apartment. Grozev then relocated to London, because, as he said, he did not feel save in Austria.

Allegedly, Ott also directly acted against Austrian interests by selling to the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) the mobile phone data of three high-ranking officials in the Ministry of Interior —the minister’s chief of staff and the advisors for police and asylum affairs. These officials’ mobile phones were damaged when a canoe capsized during a group excursion of the ministry’s top brass, an accident that was ironically caused by the minister’s press liaison at the time, who is the wife of the current chancellor of Austria. The damaged phones were taken to a BVT technician by one of their owners, to see if they could be fixed. The BVT technician allegedly told the ministry leadership that the devices were beyond repair and that he had destroyed them, as per security protocols. That was untrue, however, as the phones were seemingly given to Ott. Ott also allegedly orchestrated the selling to Russia of a highly-encrypted SINA-workstation ministry laptop with state-of-the-art German technology. Such laptops are routinely used by intelligence services and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to provide strong data protection. According to reports, when Ott was arrested, authorities found two more such workstation laptops in his possession.

The timing of the scandal is potentially problematic for the Austrian government and for its domestic intelligence service, the newly reformed DSN. The nascent agency only became operational in December 2021. It was created after a series of failures and alleged scandals, as well as the after terrorist attack of November 2, 2020, in Vienna, which claimed four lives and wounded over 20 people. These events eroded the Austrian public’s trust in the BVT and damaged the agency’s international reputation, thus leading to a subsequent series of reforms that culminated in the establishment of the DSN.

While all publicly known charges against Ott up to this point relate to the past and the problems of the old BVT, the details —especially regarding the extensive length of the investigation and the manifest inability to stop the sharing of information and other allegedly illegal activities by Ott dating to at least 2017— do not shed a positive light on Austria’s capacity to curtail intelligence activities on its soil. It remains to be seen whether the Ministry of Interior and the DSN can assure their international partners that the Ott case is simply a fall-out from the past, and that the intelligence reforms and countermeasures taken as a result will be effective in preventing similar disasters from arising in the future.

Judging from the initial political reactions, it seems that this aspect is not the first and foremost concern of the Austrian political establishment. Unquestionably, Ott’s arrest and surrounding revelations have had a number of political repercussions, as Ott appears to have provided information to several politicians from nearly all parliamentary parties, who subsequently used them for their purposes. However, these revelations have so far resulted in little more than accusations being leveled by all current and former governing political parties against each other, as well as general demands being voiced by the opposition in parliament. The current coalition government, consisting of the conservative Austrian People’s Party and the progressive Greens, now plans to overhaul the previously mentioned §256 of the Austrian criminal code. While this type of reform has been the subject of demands by some for a while now, it is unlikely to single-handedly mend the broader problems in Austrian security, and especially counter-intelligence, which have become all too obvious through the Ott case.

***Paul Schliefsteiner is the Director of the Austrian Center for Intelligence, Propaganda and Security Studies (ACIPSS) and the Editor of the Journal for Intelligence, Propaganda and Security Studies (JIPSS). He studied History, Philosophy and Law at the University of Graz, as well as International Security Studies at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich and the George C. Marshall Centre in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. He was previously a guest researcher at the Institute for Peace Preservation and Conflict Research at the Defence Academy of the Austrian Armed Forces in Vienna.

Note: The investigation into the case of Egisto Ott and the network around Jan Maršálek now extends over several years and has to be considered ongoing, with new details and aspects of the case emerging on an almost daily basis. This article, therefore, can only provide a general overview and a broad depiction of the publicly available information at this time. All individuals named herein have been subject to prior public reporting and should be considered not guilty until proven otherwise in a court of law.