It is currently not easy to keep track of the Austrian affair maelstrom.
The facts summarized under file number 711 St 39/17d in the so-called "mole act" alone read like a highly complex crime novel.
The main roles are as follows: three former intelligence officers from the – now defunct – Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counter-Terrorism (BVT).
With the help of a corrupt network, they are said to have deliberately spread confidential information.
The list of crimes against which the three men are accused is long.
It ranges from suspicion of favoritism to abuse of official authority, violation of official secrets, bribery and corruption, resistance to state authority to suspicion of defamation and the betrayal of state secrets - to name just a few of the suspected criminal offenses.
The enterprising civil servants relied on a whole network of informers in the most diverse authorities.
They hawked their findings to Wirecard board member Jan Marsalek, among others.
The fact that one of the accused, the former constitutional protection officer Egisto Ott, holed up in chats behind the silly alias Giovanni Parmigiano only proves how secure the gentlemen obviously felt.
Another suspect, currently on the run in Dubai, was involved as a helper in Marsalek's escape in the summer of 2020. The former Wirecard board member is currently believed to be in Russia.
The criminal record shows how close the relations between the moles in the civil service and the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) were.
Above all, the former FPÖ parliamentary group leader in the committee of inquiry into the alleged venality of the turquoise-blue federal government, Hans-Jörg Jenewein, maintained a close relationship with the news dealers from the BVT.
Among other things, the raid in the BVT 2018 was due to their incriminating statements, which brought hardly any usable knowledge, but massively damaged the reputation of the Austrian intelligence service abroad.
The responsible investigators doubt that the leaks in the Ministry of the Interior and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution have now been completely sealed.
The evaluation of the data on the mobile phone of Michael Kloibmüller, a top official in the Ministry of the Interior for many years, gives the public an intimate insight into the processes at the levers of power.
Kloibmüller's chats also come from the pool of moles - one of them is said not to have repaired the mobile phone that got wet in a boat accident as promised, but instead to have sucked off the conversations stored on it.
The content makes it clear who is flirting with whom, what role party affiliation plays in filling posts and how interventions lead to success.
National Council President Wolfgang Sobotka was not too bad either.
The fact that Johannes Peterlik, who has since been suspended and was formerly Austria's highest-ranking diplomat, is involved in the affair surrounding the former BVT men shows the scope of what is happening in the security apparatus.
Peterlik is suspected of having passed the formula for the neurotoxin Novichok on to Wirecard board member Marsalek, who then boasted about it to stockbrokers in London.
"The unlawful disclosure of sensitive and classified information and documents, which ultimately found their way to Jan Marsalek, is again throwing Austria back massively in international cooperation and severely damaging the reputation of our republic," says the criminal file.
More about this in the current podcast episode of SPIEGEL and STANDARD.
Social media moment of the week
A lot of ridicule on social networks was caused by the remark made by Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg on ORF, who, with a view to the Ukraine crisis, went so far as to make an oblique comparison: "In 1938 we experienced first-hand what it's like to be left alone." Austria as the first victim of the National Socialists?
Pictures of hundreds of thousands cheering Adolf Hitler's invasion in Vienna's Heldenplatz in March 1938 speak a different language.
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Yours sincerely
, Walter Mayr (Correspondent for Austria and Southeast Europe, Der SPIEGEL)
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