Austria has launched a criminal case against Egisto Ott, a former domestic intelligence officer accused of spying for Russia. Prosecutors say that between 2017 and 2021, Ott allegedly accessed confidential police databases, collected personal data, and supplied information to fugitive Wirecard executive Jan Marsalek and Russian intelligence contacts. He is also accused of handing over an encrypted European Union government laptop in exchange for €20,000. Ott, who denies wrongdoing, was arrested in March 2024 after years with the now-defunct BVT, Austria’s main counterintelligence agency. Marsalek, on the run since Wirecard’s $4 billion collapse, is alleged to have orchestrated Russian spy networks across Europe, including inside Austria.
True Spies
Mandela's Spy
What would you risk to fight a system that raised you?
Pretoria, 1988. A teenager watches in horror as a white nationalist opens fire on Black South Africans in the city square. The boy survives only because of his skin color. That moment scars him for life, and sets him on a path that will lead straight into the heart of apartheid’s security machine.
Bradley Steyn grows up inside the ideology of white supremacy, but his conscience rebels. Recruited into the South African police, he plays the role of loyal enforcer while secretly feeding intelligence to Nelson Mandela’s ANC. Every meeting, every mission, carries the risk of discovery, torture, and a bullet in the back of his head.
From gang-ruled Cape Town streets to the shadowy corridors of Pretoria’s power, Steyn lives a double life—one misstep away from death. Join Bradley Steyn in this week’s podcast selection, 'Mandela’s Spy', as he infiltrates the apartheid regime from within.
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How did a Cold War submarine hunt lead to the Titanic?
For 73 years, the world knew only the legend. In 1912, the Titanic struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage to New York and vanished beneath the Atlantic, taking more than 1,500 lives. Its exact resting place, nearly 13,000 feet down, remained a mystery.
By the early 1980s, oceanographer Robert Ballard was determined to solve it. He approached the US Navy with plans for a new deep-sea vehicle, Argo. The Navy agreed on one condition: before searching for the Titanic, Ballard had to use Argo to locate two lost nuclear submarines from the Cold War.
The debris-tracking methods perfected on that covert mission led to a breakthrough.
On September 1, 1985, Ballard’s team uncovered the Titanic’s grave on the ocean floor. This week marks the 40th anniversary of its discovery.
Image Credit: Francis Godolphin Osbourne Stuart/Wikimedia Commons
Articles
Bizarre Declassified Secrets
The CIA has revealed documents that read like the fever dreams of an overambitious spy novelist. In the 1950s, operatives plotted to drop oversized condoms labeled ‘Made in USA’ over Soviet Europe to crush morale. Decades later, they designed a heat-sensitive Osama bin Laden action figure that morphed into a demonic face, and sabotage manuals that taught office workers how to quietly wreck productivity behind enemy lines.
The bizarre didn’t stop there: illegal mind-control experiments, astral projection exercises, and secret biological tests over San Francisco blurred the line between science and the surreal. From absurd to audacious, these declassified operations expose the hidden creativity of US spy agencies.
Explore these schemes and more in this SPYSCAPE article.
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What did long-haul luxury look like at 35,000 feet?
In the early 1970s, Air Canada turned the upper deck of its brand-new Boeing 747s into disco lounges. Passengers bound for Europe could step out of their seats and onto a dance floor, sip cocktails at a curved bar, and move to the beat of 8-track tapes under moody lights.
The short-lived experiment was part of an aviation trend to use the 747’s spacious hump for leisure rather than seating. For a few glamorous years, the transatlantic crossing wasn’t just about getting from Toronto to Europe—it was about getting there in style. By the mid-1970s, economics won out over extravagance. The mirrored walls came down, the bars closed, and the disco floors gave way to rows of economy seats.
Design
Concrete Hi-Fi
Could concrete redefine hi-fi?
In the early 1980s, industrial designer Ron Arad cast sound into stone. His “Concrete Stereo,” built in 1983, embedded standard components in raw, quick-drying concrete — a deliberate counterpoint to hi-fi’s rise as a sleek consumer luxury. Only about ten were made, and half now sit in major museum collections. Technically functional, the system was less about audio quality and more about provocation: a critique of consumerism set in stone.
Five years later, Swiss audio company Thorens unveiled its “Concrete” turntable in 1988, a sculptural machine of concrete and steel. A leaf-sprung aluminum sub-chassis damped vibrations, while a mineral-glass platter floated on a precision motor borrowed from Thorens’ 300 series. Wow and flutter measured 0.035%, rumble registered –72 dB. Fitted with the SME 3009 S2 tonearm, it was produced in only a few hundred units. Unlike its predecessor this system was an audiophile dream.
Image Credit: Thorens/Concrete/agrainoftime
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