The more details surface, the less they explain the alleged Russian intelligence scandal surrounding Slovenia’s President Nataša Pirc Musar. This is especially the cardinal piece of evidence those point to who’d like to remove Pirc Musar from office.

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine”, Humphrey Bogart’s character Rick Blaine says, after Ingrid Bergman’s Isla Lund has entered Rick’s Café in Casablanca.

I’ve felt very much reminded of this famous line when I read about the details that had surfaced in what the political enemies of Slovenia’s President Nataša Pirc Musar try to make into a Russian intelligence scandal, with a Russian born woman in its center Pirc Musar describes as her best friend. I’ll just call her K., after the first letter of her last name.

It’s only that in a sense, what those people think of as the cardinal piece of evidence is this Casablanca quote in reverse.

While Casablanca may have a tragic love story as its official center, and K.’s relationship in Russia is long over, and she left the „all gin joints“ place rather than enter it, the movie is primarily about spies and sabotage in a war torn world. This, and most likely its fictionality, make some of it an apt comparison with the Slovenian pseudo scandal.

And there is the paranoia as another parallel.

By continuing to be best friends with K. after she was elected President, Pirc Musar’s political enemies say, she opened up the center of Slovenian politics to covert Russian influence.

A Strange Coincidence

They point to something as key evidence that can really only be described as a very weird coincidence. About 17 or 18 years ago, when she was still living in her home town Krasnojarsk in Siberia, K. shared an apartment with an older woman with the same last name – presumably her mother – and a certain Roman Jeglič.

Jeglič, then deputy director of Slovenia’s intelligence service, was at the center of the greatest intelligence scandal shaking the country shortly after its independence from Yugoslavia in the early 1990’s. He had tried to oust the agency’s director by smearing his reputation to members of government. Shortly thereafter he is alleged to have been involved in a Ponzi scheme, and fled to Russia in the mid 1990’s.

There, he worked as representative for Gorenje, the renown manufacturer of household appliances from Slovenia.

Of all the apartments, in all the towns, in all the world, he shared an apartment with K. and her mother in Krasnojarsk, more than 3.000 kilometers east of Moscow.

We do not know when he got there, why, or how. In a brief telephone interview with a private TV station, Jeglič, or a man claiming to be him, confirmed he had a relationship with K. that ended in 2009.

There apparently have always been speculations that Jeglič developped ties with Russian intelligence, presumably the FSB. To them, someone with his experience was an important asset. We can be sure he was debriefed when he got to Russia.

Whether or not this ever turned into more, we can at best speculate. If the answer is yes, Krasnojarsk would seem an odd choice as a place of residence. Gorenje Russia, located at Jakimanskaja quay in Moscow, probably has a branch in Krasnojarsk as well. But it’s a very long way from FSB head offices. That would make it highly impractical from an intelligence perspective.

Also, the media research team that broke the connection between him an K. says it found no evidence that he had been working for Russian intelligence.

Jeglič appears to have moved back to Slovenia.

A Loose End, if There Ever Was One

While many Balkan people may think I’m a spy – and funnily most often mistake me for Slovenian – I am not an intelligence expert. Still, it doesn’t take an expert to know that services want to avoid their assets being identified all too easily. They like to tie up loose ends.

If K. is indeed a Russian operative, as many people in Slovenia think, Jeglič‘ connection to her and especially their sharing an apartment in Krasnojarsk is exactly that kind of loose end. It just would have taken someone to browse through the register of the city’s residents to investigate K. – and boom there you go.

Lo and behold, this is exactly what happened. The Austrian Press Agency APA and the Slovenian daily Dnevnik say they got hold of a leak with hacked data from Russian registries, and found Jeglič registered in the same apartment as K. and her mother. The leak’s source Dnevnik names is somewhat dubious, but that could be to protect the real source. It may very well be located in Slovenia.

There can be no doubt that Slovenian intelligence did their best to keep tabs on Jeglič after he absconded to Russia. At the time, he was the country’s Public Enemy No 1. And you kind of do want to know where one of your most senior intelligence officials disappeared to and what he might tell to whom.

It can’t have been all that difficult. He was working for a Slovenian company. One that was state owned at the time, no less.

To them, it couldn’t have been an unsurmountable task to have known his exact address in Krasnojarsk in the mid 00s. FSB must have known this, too. They chose not to erase Jeglič‘ name from the registry. It would have been an easy thing to do. Intelligence services do that all the time, even in democratic countries.

We could speculate all day long what the reasons were. The least plausible reason not to hide that Jeglič and K. were sharing an apartment is that FSB wanted to infiltrate K. into Slovenia to do for them whatever Russian spies do in Slovenia.

Sure, Jeglič would have been the ideal man to prepare her for some aspects of that work. But not when they were registered at the same address.

There simply was a huge risk that after K. emigrated to Slovenia, and especially after she applied for Slovenian citizenship, that someone in some Slovenian government service would do their job properly and discover the obvious link to Jeglič.

Slovenian intelligence said it vetted K. after she applied for citizenship and found no security concerns. That was in 2016.

A Harebrained Scheme

In season 1 and 2 of the long running series NCIS, the boss enemy is the product of exactly such a long term scheme. His father, a Mossad agent, had fathered him with a Palestinian doctor, in order to infiltrate him into Hamas. That plant, confusingly named Ari, then runs a complicated Hamas terrorist plot in the US, in order to run on his agents at the last moment, in order to then turn on US agents and kill one of them.

The dedicated Balkan paranoiac imagines exactly this kind of devious, complicated long term scheme is behind Pirn Musar’s friendship with K. Jeglič honeytrapped K. In other words, he started a romantic relationship with her in Krasnojarsk in order to recruit her for FSB, in order to send her into Slovenia, in order to make friends with a prominent lawyer who may rise to a position of import and influence sometimes later.

It doesn’t get any better by the fact that we can assume that whatever control he may have had through this romantic relationship would have waned over time when K. was in Slovenia. They couldn’t see each other for years like at all.

And why, of all places, would Jeglič pick Krasnojarsk as the place to best honeytrap a plant into Slovenia? Wouldn’t Moscow or St. Petersburg have been more obvious choices? Much easier access to FSB training grounds, and all the other infrastructure a future plant would foreseeably need.

It’s not impossible. It’s just extremely unlikely. Especially considering that Jeglič himself would have been a huge security risk in that operation. It would have been harebrained.

The Guillaume Affair – Or What to Be Careful About in Intelligence

Historically, there is only one somewhat comparable case of such a long term plant operation. It failed almost the moment it succeeded. That was the so called Guillaume or Willy Brandt affair.

Günther and Christel Guillaume were to Stasi operatives who were sent to West Germany to see how far they could work their way into influential circles in order to provide sensitive information to East German and by extension Soviet intelligence, and to sometimes aid in operations to influence politics or public opinion in West Germany.

Both became activists in local branches of Germany’s Social Democratic Party. By sheer luck Günther eventually worked on the staff of party chairman Willy Brandt, who became German chancellor in 1969. In 1972, Guillaume became Brandt’s close aid, effectively a sort of chief of staff for party affairs.

It is not certain whether or not he participated in the Stasi operation that narrowly foiled a vote of no confidence against Brandt and his cabinet in West Germany’s parliament in 1972. Stasi bribed two conservative Members of Parliament to vote in favor of Brandt.

West German intelligence had started suspecting Günter and Christel Guillaume in 1973, and investigated them. In 1974 they arrested the couple in their apartment in Bonn on yet very flimsy evidence. After Guillaume confessed during his arrest for unkown reasons, both were sentenced to long term imprisonments.

With one minor exception, it is unclear what, if any, sensitive information Guillaume ever had access to, and there seems to have been little of substance he could ever relay to his handlers. Well placed though he may have been, he was also not very effective.

Nevertheless, Brandt took full responsibility for the security leak and resigned his office a few days later. Many contemporaries believed that he had grown tired of his office, and did not want to govern anymore, and that the affair was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.

What allowed West German intelligence to blow to Guillaume spy ring sky high was personal messages on a level far short of K.’s and Jeglič communication would have entailed if there were anything to the honey trap theory.

Stasi sent coded personal messages such as birthday wishes to its West German operatives. Guillaume also got one for the birth of his son Pierre, congratulating him to „the second man“. That was in 1957. It took German intelligence and their US helpers a whole 15 years to decode them. They still couldn’t identify the addressees of the messages, and had to rely on matching the dates the messages were sent on.

Slovenian intelligence had much, much more at their disposal in the mid 00s, let alone today.

FSB knows that. We can assume they wanted to avoid to make similar, if not greater, mistakes.

FSB may be responsible for one of the greatest intelligence blunders in human history in 2022, when their colossal misjudgement of the situation in the Ukraine was a main contributor to Vladimir Putin’s decision to start an illegal war of aggression against Ukraine. 20 years ago, everyone still considered them a very capable agency. According to media reports, it relied primarily on human assets. Meaning: They were pretty good at infiltratring spies, turning people, getting people to do whatever they needed, even without their knowledge.

So it’s not very likely they would have made that kind of mistake they made according to Pirc Musar’s political enemies.

If we believe them, FSB must have been both ingenious and incredibly stupid when it planted K. All at the same time. It takes a conspiracy theorist to square those contradictions.

Russia Certainly Has Spies in Slovenia

FSB certainly has spies in Slovenia. Much like it does in just about every country of the world.

I have no idea how high up Slovenia is in Russian intelligence’s priority list. Probably higher than its small number of inhabitants would suggest. It is a rich country. It is a member of both EU and NATO. There are some historical ties through Yugoslavia, very complicated though they may be.

A small number of these spies will be some of the 4- to 6.000 people born in Russia who now live in Slovenia. I could not establish a precise number. Some will also be people born in today’s Ukraine. We don’t know that for a fact, and again: I’m not an expert on intelligence operations or intelligence agencies. But what transpires about FSB operations abroad from time to time makes this common sense.

But the sheer number of Russian – and Ukrainian – born residents of Slovenia tells us that just a tiny minority of these people can be Russian assets. How many spies do you need for a country with 2 million inhabitants?

Randomly suspecting everyone born in Russia of being a Russian spy is ludicrous. And it is defamatory.

Not to forget that like every major intelligence service in the world, the Russians will certainly also recruit locals to do whatever spies do.

Enter The Silent Undead

But in an atmosphere of general paranoia, rationality and decency go out the window. The poisoned political atmosphere in Slovenia doesn’t make things better. Janez Janša, Slovenia’s undead nationalist, just sneaked his way into power as prime minister a few months ago – largely thanks to an actual intelligence scandal.

Black Cube, a private Israeli intelligence company illegaly taped the communications of members of the then left wing liberal Slovenian government and leaked private conversations to primarily right wing media in the country during the election campaign for parliament earlier this year. Janša, who has a history of corruption scandals and abuse of power in previous government positions, denied he had ever had any contact with Black Cube.

As Black Cube has close ties with Israel’s government, and as the then Slovenian government had recognized a Palestinian state, Israeli government involvement appears likely.

Janšas party came in second in the parliamentary elections. When the first placed, liberal, party failed to form a coalition, Janša formed a minority government, tolerated by minor political factions.

Janša is a a bitter political enemy of President Pirc Musar. She was elected on a liberal platform, and she stands between him and near total political control.

Does Casablanca Have a Sad or a Happy End?

Also, he has an axe to grind with the man passionate Balkan paranoiacs consider to be the center of and key evidence for the alleged new intelligence scandal.

In 1988, he was arrested after an agent for then Yugoslav intelligence filed charges against Janša and a few other Slovenian separists for betraying military secrets. Janša and his fellow nationalists were sentenced to 18 months in prison. The name of that agent was Roman Jeglič.

The same Roman Jeglič who got romantically involved and shared an apartment with K. in Krasnojarsk in Siberia. The same K. whom the current President of the Republic of Slovenia describes as her best friend.

“Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine”.

Janša, interestingly, seems to have kept silent as the alleged scandal has erupted.

There are others to do the dirty work.

No matter what one thinks of the protagonists of this real life reverse Casablanca – K., Roman Jeglič, Nataša Pirc Musar, and for once silent Janez Janša, no matter whether or not one believes this unlikely spy story, let’s hope it will end less bloody than the original movie.

(Even though shooting a Nazi officer is not to be despised as such, just that there is none to be seen in this reverse edition.)

Which brings me to another important question, that perhaps relates to Slovenia’s alleged intelligence scandal: Does Casablanca have a sad or a happy end?

Title photo: With the exception of Ljubljana’s city hall, I do not have any photos of any Slovenian government building in my photo archive. As I do not have any photos of gin bottles or glasses, either, I decided to use one of a bottle of Union beer. It’s brewed in Ljubljana. I had it in the restaurant car on the train ride back to Vienna. Good beer, btw. Although the question whether Union or Laško is the better Slovenian beer is probably the only question that will divide the country even more than whether or not K. is a Russian spy.

Special thanks go to this wonderful movie site from Australia for providing more context to the Casablanca quote and saving me a lot of work to refresh my memory.

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