Twenty years after the end of the Cold War, Vienna remains a spy haven, swarming with foreign agents who think nothing of killing in broad daylight while the Austrian authorities turn a blind eye, experts said.
Vienna formed the backdrop to Orson Welles’ legendary spy thriller The Third Man in 1949, but even today it remains a hive of secret service activity.
“Austria is still a favorite place for agents. They’re frequently known to the authorities, but rarely hindered. Everything is handled courteously and diplomatically. There’s a long tradition in that,” said Siegfried Beer, director of the Austrian Center for Intelligence, Propaganda and Security Studies at the University of Graz.
In the latest addition to a growing list of cases that look unlikely ever to be resolved, a Chechen dissident, Umar Israilov, was gunned down in broad daylight in the Austrian capital on Jan. 23.
Other cases include the 1989 killing of Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, the head of a Kurdish opposition group in Iranian Kurdistan, and the attempted kidnapping in October of Kazakhstan’s former intelligence chief Alnur Musayev. Both were living in exile in Austria.
“Austria is a textbook case for this sort of operation that always remains unresolved. As soon as there is any sort of political link, the authorities start acting very strangely,” said journalist Kid Moechel, an author of a book on the subject.
For Peter Pilz, defense expert for the opposition Green party, “Some regimes such as Russia and Iran enjoy a freedom to do as they please in Vienna that they would never enjoy elsewhere.”
“Quite simply, the Austrian authorities don’t want to jeopardize their country’s economic interests,” the parliamentarian said.
He accused the Austrian Interior Ministry of trying to “cover up” the murder of Israilov, who had repeatedly asked for special police protection before he was gunned down while out grocery shopping last month.
Vienna, whose geographical position makes it a point of contact between East and West and North and South, has one of the highest densities of spies in the world, experts said.
It is home to international groups such as the International Atomic Energy Agency, OPEC and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
In all, at least 17,000 diplomats are based in Vienna, equivalent to around 1 percent of the city’s population, official figures show.
“Around half of these have links to the secret services,” Beer said.
Politician Pilz asserted that Vienna is also “a hub where it’s very easy to buy arms or hide or launder money.”
However, the advent in recent years of hundreds of thousands of refugees in Austria, including around 20,000 Chechens, is providing new impetus for secret service activity.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
‘BODIES EVERYWHERE’: The incident occurred at a Filipino festival celebrating an anti-colonial leader, with the driver described as a ‘lone suspect’ known to police Canadian police arrested a man on Saturday after a car plowed into a street party in the western Canadian city of Vancouver, killing a number of people. Authorities said the incident happened shortly after 8pm in Vancouver’s Sunset on Fraser neighborhood as members of the Filipino community gathered to celebrate Lapu Lapu Day. The festival, which commemorates a Filipino anti-colonial leader from the 16th century, falls this year on the weekend before Canada’s election. A 30-year-old local man was arrested at the scene, Vancouver police wrote on X. The driver was a “lone suspect” known to police, a police spokesperson told journalists at the
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has unveiled a new naval destroyer, claiming it as a significant advancement toward his goal of expanding the operational range and preemptive strike capabilities of his nuclear-armed military, state media said yesterday. North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said Kim attended the launching ceremony for the 5,000-tonne warship on Friday at the western port of Nampo. Kim framed the arms buildup as a response to perceived threats from the US and its allies in Asia, who have been expanding joint military exercises amid rising tensions over the North’s nuclear program. He added that the acquisition
RSS