How a mild-mannered family man became Putin’s public enemy No 1

He’s the journalist who tracked down Alexei Navalny’s poisoners, identified the Salisbury agents and exposed the spies convicted in the UK this month. Christo Grozev reveals how he gets results when intelligence agencies fail.

Did you ever think you would be investigating an assassination attempt against yourself?” I ask Christo Grozev. “No, clearly this is from the realms of a really crazy novel,” he says. “It doesn’t happen. Until it does.”

Grozev is the world’s leading investigative journalist when it comes to Vladimir Putin’s government. The modern-day Sherlock Holmes uses data: flight paths, satellite imagery, phone records, YouTube videos and digital breadcrumbs to create spreadsheets and identify killers. He helps whistleblowers and chemical weapons scientists escape Russia and delves into corruption and criminality. According to associates, he has uncovered 300 agents, but he has the names of 5000 more spies. “It’s one big puzzle,” he says. “It was only when we cracked open the network that we understood the scale of the killing machine.”

Fluent in four languages, Grozev led the way in identifying the spies involved in the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, as well as those who targeted Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury with novichok. He has tracked down Vadim Krasikov, a professional killer who shot his victims from a bicycle, and myriad other would-be assassins, as well as disabling agents and providing crucial evidence in court. “I’m a headache to Putin,” he says.

Two years ago, the film he helped to make about Navalny’s poisoning won a Bafta and an Oscar. Now his own extraordinary life is the subject of a Channel 4 documentary, Kill List: Hunted by Putin’s Spies, after Bulgarian agents were discovered plotting to abduct and kill him.

Produced by the investigative bureau Bellingcat, for which Grozev has worked, the documentary was made by award-winning British director James Jones, who filmed with Grozev for almost three years. “It was just me with my camera, so I think he enjoyed the company. It was such a disorientating time when he discovered he was being targeted,” Jones says. “At first it all felt a bit far-fetched – I thought, is this in his head? Then they arrested these people and it was all true.”

The film feels more like a thriller than a documentary. “Just more sinister,” Grozev says.

Only two weeks ago, part of this Bulgarian spy ring – two female agents and a champion swimmer – were found guilty at the Old Bailey, joining three others convicted last year. “They come across as muppets but they were deadly serious,” Grozev says. He knows he is still at risk; the mastermind of this group, Jan Marsalek, is now in Moscow. He is one of Europe’s most wanted men for his links to an alleged £1.6 billion fraud at the collapsed German financial company Wirecard.

For years Grozev assumed that he would never feature on Putin’s kill list. “It’s easy when you are tracking saboteurs to become unaware of your own vulnerability: the hunters can’t be hunted syndrome,” he explains.

But then they came for him. Grozev found himself on a Russian arrest warrant. His father died in mysterious circumstances, and he now lives in hiding with two suitcases, unable to see his family and friends. As his son says in the documentary, “My dad has managed to make one of the most dangerous men on the planet very angry.”

‘I am constantly stressed’

How did this mild-mannered, happily married 55-year-old father of two and radio executive come to spend all his savings buying up data, imperilling his life to uncover Russian would-be assassins and spies? It’s hard to comprehend why he would put himself on the line and jeopardise his family’s wellbeing.

We talk on Zoom, though I can’t see his face. “I didn’t sleep much last night. It’s an occupational hazard now,” he says. “I am constantly stressed, so I hope I sound coherent.” Where once I might have thought him a conspiracy theorist, it’s clear after the Old Bailey verdict and the assassination attempts on myriad Putin opponents that Grozev has just been ahead of the curve. “Dictators love darkness and loathe transparency,” one of Grozev’s collaborators explains. The investigative journalist is shining an unwelcome light on the Russian president.

How did this all start? Who would abandon everything to become Putin’s public enemy No 1? As he admits, “They are stripping away the fundamental things of my life one by one.” Why is Grozev taking such a risk?

“The simple answer is that it’s my midlife crisis,” he says, laughing darkly. “But I think it had something to do with my childhood. I grew up in socialist Bulgaria. When I was 14, I decided I wanted to be a radio journalist and DJ, but the first article I wrote for my youth club magazine was deemed politically unacceptable. That made me more determined.”

His parents, he thinks, also had something to do with it. “My parents were irresponsible hippies. My mother taught me how to listen to Radio Free Europe when I was nine, which was illegal at the time, but she wanted me to hear real news. They were both maths teachers: my father was a rebel, a head teacher in a small village. He refused to shave his long hair, so he was sacked. He became a fashion designer.”

Because his parents weren’t party members, the young Grozev wasn’t allowed to study media. “So I went to a local linguistics university. During the first summer there was a competition to help build a cycle path in England to improve our language skills.” It was 1989 and Bulgarians were still behind the Iron Curtain. Afterwards, he went to visit the local studios of Radio Free Europe and was interviewed about the political state of Bulgaria. “I think communism will collapse sooner than anyone expects,” the 18-year-old said. When he came back, he was kicked out of university. “Fortunately, I was right, and communism collapsed in eight months.”

Months after the Berlin Wall came down, he seized his chance and went to study journalism at the American University in Bulgaria. So he started investigative reporting young? “Not at all. I went straight after graduation into managing commercial radio stations across Europe and Russia. I was a businessman.”

Eventually he owned the company. But then Putin started closing the media space and his company’s licence was threatened unless he sold out to government supporters. “The day after they bought the station, the propaganda started.”

By now Grozev was living a comfortable life with his wife, whom he met at university, and their two young children in Vienna. His parents had moved close by to help with childcare. He knew he wanted to do something to fight back, training journalists to cover stories, but it wasn’t until 2014 that he decided he needed to step up himself and become an investigative journalist.

“I was at our summer house with my kids when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down between Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur. No one understood why. But I knew how to program and code, I was very proficient in technology, so I started applying all my skills to data analysis to discover what had happened.”

Enter Bellingcat

As he began blogging his findings, the investigative group Bellingcat approached him to ask if he wanted to join its growing volunteer army, analysing the news of the day. “I worked out the Russian military personnel involved in the downing of the plane. Then I began to investigate a coup attempt that took place in Montenegro in 2016. The Montenegrin government said it had been caused by Russian intelligence; the world said, this is crazy, you’re faking it. I did an investigation proving again there were Russian operatives involved.”

At first he tried to remain anonymous. “It wasn’t until the Navalny investigation that I was named, because it seemed so insane that a political opponent could still be poisoned in the 21st century. I needed to convince the Russian people what was going on.”

Next came the Salisbury poisoners in 2018. “I led that investigation. There was a call for witnesses by the Metropolitan Police. They had found surveillance footage of two guys who had been near the Skripals’ house before the poisoning; they published their photos and fake names.” That was all he and his small team needed. “The adrenaline rush was epic. The security services couldn’t figure this out. I thought we could.”

It’s clear that he relishes being first. “We were able to prove these people had fake identities as we got copies of their passports and found they didn’t exist until a couple of years before. They had no real estate, no social media or bank accounts, no phones; they were fresh personalities. The second thing we discovered was that their passport numbers were consecutive. So we looked for more from the same range and we found a third man travelling with them with a fake identity.

“It was thrilling that we were ahead of the curve. We had to look through all the crumbs. Finally, we found people who looked exactly the same but were in the military.” Bingo.

They soon discovered that they hadn’t just got the Salisbury poisoners. “We suddenly had 100 leads. I looked at the travel pattern of the same three poisoners and I discovered they had been in many other places at the exact time when interesting things were happening. This team was involved in the poisoning of a Bulgarian I was dealing with, various munitions explosions and other unexplained events. Then we looked at others who travelled on joint flight bookings with them. We discovered a total of 50 spies. We looked at their history of travel and we were deluged by so many coincidences of crime and travel. It was overwhelming.”

Then, in 2019, the news came that someone had shot and killed Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Chechen Georgian dissident, in Berlin. “I said, ‘Let’s start looking at this case.’ It took us a year and a half and we identified the culprit as a senior intelligence officer close to President Putin. They arrested the man and I became the prosecution’s main witness. I ended up in court giving testimony while the killer was staring at me. It was a blood-curdling experience, but he was sentenced to life in prison.”

The next project was the Navalny investigation. “It was the first time we focused on a crime inside Russia, so it was harder to get evidence. Navalny and I hadn’t got on – I had criticised him on Twitter – but when he was poisoned, I was incensed. When we cracked the case I sent him a message saying, ‘I think I discovered who poisoned you.’ We had the names and faces of eight people who had been tracking him for several years.”

Grozev drove to the south of Germany where Navalny was recuperating and they struck up a friendship. “Navalny was astonishingly brave. When he was killed it was the most emotional day of my life. I had been working behind the scenes on a deal to swap him with the killer from Berlin… The night before he was killed, I had secured assurances everyone was close to achieving a deal. The next day he was found dead.” The Berlin killer, Vadim Krasikov, was eventually swapped for a group of Westerners, but now Grozev had another enemy on the loose.

And he was firmly on Putin’s hit list. “I’d always known I was a target of hacking attempts. The first time I realised something may be wrong was when one of my phones disappeared in Montenegro where I was attending a conference in 2021. It was a burner, so there was nothing valuable on it, but it went from my hotel room.”

Then, when he was promoting the Navalny film ahead of the Oscars in early 2023 in America, he got a call from the police. “I met them at a café and they said, ‘You can’t leave.’ I said, ‘I’m going to Austria tonight,’ and they said, ‘You can’t. A team has been watching you for a long time.’ I said, ‘What’s the worst they can do?’ Then I realised my life was on the line. So I had to stay.”

How did his family feel? “What made my wife angry is that she said she married a fun DJ not a forensic investigator. And a DJ doesn’t usually get killed. It’s been extremely hard for her.”

Their son and daughter thought that he had gone crazy and was having a midlife crisis when he started his crusade. “At first they were dismissive. But after the Navalny film they both became much more appreciative. My daughter, a student, signed up for an investigative journalism internship; my son is helping to produce videos on my investigations for YouTube.”

He worries constantly about their safety. “It’s one reason I think I must stay away. These wannabe kidnappers are so unprofessional, while at the same time so motivated to do something even worse than they have been tasked with, that me just being near my children is exposing them to more risk.”

A man on the move

So Grozev moves constantly, never disclosing his whereabouts. “I live in apartments under an assumed name. Any time I have gone back to Austria, I have had to go in disguise with police protection. The only places I feel a little safer are the US and UK. If you are a Russian spy, you find the weakest link of the weakest country and then you can go where you want in Europe. The US and UK have stricter borders.”

Then his father died. “That was the most disturbing moment of my life. I feel very guilty whether it was to do with Russian involvement. It is most likely he was collateral damage, but he may have died of natural causes… I have decided not to look further. I was shown recently a photograph by the police of one of the spies taking a selfie outside my father’s apartment with an arrow pointing to the balcony. That was disturbing.”

Grozev was encouraged by security services not to trace the team that was tracking him. “But obviously in retracing my own steps I discovered evidence of these people everywhere. My daughter had alerted me in 2022 before I was aware of their existence. She saw one of them spying in the street while we were in a restaurant in Vienna. I didn’t believe her; I thought she was imagining things as a 14-year-old. Then I discovered that they had broken into my apartment the day he had been staking us out, so she was right.”

The team that hunted him are, like Grozev, from Bulgaria. “It is strange they are Bulgarian, but I think it is pure coincidence. They don’t use Russians as we are alert to them, but a Bulgarian is a citizen of the EU; they can go anywhere. Now I have seen their faces, I can recognise two of them. There was also this intended honeytrap where a woman befriended me on Facebook. But I didn’t notice her trying to flirt with me… I was always looking at my laptop or phone.”

This now feels very personal between him and Putin. “It is hard to say whether Putin is directly out to get me, but we do have a direct statement on one of the spy’s chats saying, ‘Apparently Putin really hates him; that’s why we have to do this.’ Navalny told me when we cracked his case, ‘Once I was Putin’s enemy No 1. Soon it will be you.’ I thought that was a jocular statement, an exaggeration. Now I think it may be true.”

Looking back, there must be moments when Grozev wishes he had never become involved in such a dangerous line of work. “I don’t look back and think, ‘Why did I do this?’ It’s such a hard question. In terms of contribution, it has definitely been worth it. From a life perspective, because of the pain I have caused to people near me, I’m not sure.”

What does he feel his main achievement has been? “Over a 10-year stretch we have disabled and cancelled maybe thousands of Russian potential killers and spies because we showed the methods they used, their faces and passports, and we could see how many of these spies were recalled because they were assumed burnt.” He pauses. “This has also shamed Western intelligence services to a degree and law enforcement – they’ve started doing a much better job.”

The intelligence agencies look weak compared with this one-man grenade, but it’s good to know he has been teaching them his methods. “We’ve also proved to ordinary Russian people what this government has been engaged in,” he adds.

Grozev could have become a spy and operated more conventionally within the protection of the security services. “I don’t work for anyone; it makes me more flexible. No one is going to give me a fake passport unfortunately. But there is a strong satisfaction in the David v Goliath sense.”

One former Russian spymaster recently admitted to him that Putin thought Grozev was a spy. “It’s much easier to have a calm night’s sleep if you believe your enemy is the CIA or MI6 and not some insignificant journalist outsmarting you.”

What will he do next? “I have 35 ongoing investigations that I need to finish, and my colleagues are yelling that I am delaying them. I want to teach more journalists the tools and tricks of open-source investigation so this becomes a mass approach, and I’d like to make more films.”

But the arrival of President Donald Trump has stymied him. He worries about the changes in America for the world and for his own safety. “I don’t know if it will be valid any more.” He must be concerned that Trump does not see Putin in the same light as Grozev does. “I think he doesn’t care. He sees everything as a transaction, therefore it doesn’t matter how dangerous Putin is as long as he is prepared to play ball with him over what he wants.”

Having studied Putin for years, Grozev knows he is a formidable enemy. “His people are very good at profiling people – much better than the West is at profiling Putin. [The Russians] know exactly what makes Trump happy.”

Why does he think that Putin has survived so long? “That’s the title of my daughter’s term paper and I am looking forward to reading it. I think it’s his mastery of balancing competing economic and security groups in Russia, making sure no one trusts anyone else. He’s a Don Corleone… The oligarchs have suffered but none of them will act alone.”

These changes would have happened faster if Trump hadn’t been elected a second time to the White House, he believes. “The Russian elite were fearing the gradual decline of their way of life and the wartime economy wasn’t sustainable long-term, so they were ready to make compromises with the West, return some land and look for a fairish deal. Suddenly, they have been handed presents they hadn’t anticipated.”

Grozev thinks there will be a resurgence of Russian imperial ambition. “A friend was in a fancy ski resort in Switzerland last week and said, ‘They’re back.’ For three years they had hidden or pretended to be modest Ukrainians at the corner table; now they are spraying champagne and singing communist anthems. They think they have won. That is a problem. The regime will last for another long stretch, not just one to two years, which recently seemed plausible.”

But Grozev will keep going. “I haven’t slept much but I am still here. My stress levels are pretty high, but part of that is just being a displaced person. I can’t complain because there are millions of displaced Ukrainians, hundreds of thousands of good Russians who decided not to be part of the system. It is still a huge strain not to know where your home is, not be able to see your children, go to your father’s funeral or go back home ever. That’s my new normal, but at least I am alive and I’m functioning.”

Written by: Alice Thomson

© The Times of London