The video runs a few seconds: a young woman in a knit sweater stands against the Russian tricolor, then walks with the same flag past the Bundestag - Berlin wind, tourists, Norman Foster's glass dome overhead. The caption is friendly, the tone homey. The account is called "Katya." Katya admires Vladimir Putin, dislikes NATO, and wants to be noticed.
She was noticed.
No Katya ever existed. For nearly a year the name belonged to Angelique Geray, a fearless reporter for the German broadcaster RTL and the magazine Stern, who specializes in what the profession dryly calls participant observation and what in practice means living someone else's life in order to be trusted. The result came out at the end of the summer: a documentary called Putins Wegwerfagenten, "Putin's Disposable Agents," first on the streaming service RTL+ in August, then in an expanded ninety-minute version on RTL on September 2. A team of seven spent roughly a year on it.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, European countries expelled several hundred Russian diplomats in total, and the station operating under diplomatic cover went out the door with them. Infrastructure built over decades was dismantled in a matter of months. You cannot replace a career intelligence officer quickly. What you can do, it turned out, is hire more or less anyone - through a messaging app, for small money, for a single job. The term "disposable agent," Wegwerfagent, literally "throwaway agent," has been showing up in German counterintelligence documents and in the press for about three years now.
Geray built Katya slowly and in earnest. The idea was simple: to understand how pro-Russian networks in Germany actually operate by becoming the bait. Not to investigate how people are recruited, but to get recruited. This was no throwaway account. It took months to build an audience organically, make acquaintances, accumulate comments, become one of the crowd on the pro-Russian scene of German-language social media. There are, surprisingly, more people there than is generally assumed, and they are not just pensioners nostalgic for East Germany.
Then the offers started.
Innocent ones at first. Photograph a building. Pick up a parcel. Register a SIM card. The pay is small but immediate, and in crypto. The film shows how the staircase is built: each step is only slightly higher than the last, and a person climbs it without noticing that they stopped being on the outside a long time ago and are now inside a new and ghostly reality. The requests grew more specific. Film facilities around Germany. Take a look at the Christian Democratic Union, the chancellor's governing party - specifically, collect contacts and personal data. At the ILA air show in Berlin, where defense-industry executives gather, obtain their business cards and details. Keep tabs on nongovernmental organizations. "Find missing DHL parcels," a phrase that sounds like an errand out of ordinary life, right up to the moment you remember that two years ago in Leipzig, prepared parcels were meant to ignite aboard aircraft in transit.
The logic of the system is assembled out of small pieces. Communication runs almost entirely through Telegram. The client never identifies himself. The contractor knows only his own fragment of the assignment: photograph the door, deliver the package, buy the card. The whole thing is put together far away in Moscow, beyond the reach of German criminal law. If the contractor is caught, and he is caught fairly quickly, because he is inexperienced, leaves traces, and is frequently just stupid, it emerges that there is no one to charge but him. He is the entire offense. The people who hired him throw him away like a disposable hygiene product, which is where the name of the phenomenon comes from.
They look for such people by uncomplicated markers: shortage of money, hard circumstances, a criminal record. No spy-novel romance here. No elegant James Bond plots, none of the traditional four to eight thousand euros a month Moscow once paid its agents to keep them on the hook, not even ideology, as in the textbook case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
Katya's story includes one thoroughly comic episode. At some point her channel caught the attention of Jovica Jovic, a member of the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), the left-populist party that split from the Left and advocates for immediate talks with Moscow and against arms deliveries to Ukraine. Jovic has around thirty-five thousand TikTok followers; the reporters describe him as one of the more prominent figures on Germany's pro-Russian scene. First he messaged Katya, then he called her, then he met her in person. And he began offering advice on how to grow the channel. The tip now being retold by every outlet in Europe was this: Katya should dance on a NATO flag, trampling it underfoot. The audience will love it.
Their conversation also turned to the question of who, exactly, is behind all this. Geray asked him directly: is Russian intelligence running the campaign? Jovic's answer, as RTL renders it, went roughly like this: nobody ever knows that. Meaning, he isn't supposed to know, but in practical terms he does. And, so that no misunderstanding could remain, he added that the reason he does not say out loud that the Russian services are involved is that he is smart.
Later, when Geray stopped being Katya and came to him under her own name with a camera and a microphone, Jovic denied everything. No ties to Russian intelligence, no role in a disinformation campaign. The BSW played dumb, saying Jovic is a rank-and-file member who holds no office in the party and that the matter would be looked into.
As a scene it is wonderfully well-plotted: a politician advising an invented girl to dance on a flag, a ready-made metaphor for the whole deranged German pro-Russian milieu, a pointless online amateur theater company living on views and likes. It would be merely funny if the other side of the funny amateur theatricals were not grown-up violence.
Stefan Thuman founded the Bavarian company Donaustahl, which manufactures drones for Ukraine. He was not a public figure, the reporters did not find him quickly, and he is speaking to the press for the first time. According to the investigation, he was followed by at least two suspected disposable agents working in Russia's interests. When one of them was detained, a machete was found on him (at this point I personally think of the ice axe they killed Trotsky with). Thuman has been living in hiding ever since.
From advice about dancing on a flag to a machete is a distance the participants cover without noticing. They are not supposed to notice it; that is the point of compartmentalization. The person filming a factory entrance on his phone has no obligation to know what will happen at that entrance a month later. Legally this makes him nearly innocent. Practically, it makes him entirely replaceable. There's nothing not to like.
The reporters reconstructed the story of the parcels that were supposed to ignite in cargo holds at Leipzig/Halle airport. They traveled to Lithuania and met a defendant whom prosecutors consider another throwaway contractor. The overall picture they draw is a hybrid strategy in which cheaply hired helpers, cyberattacks, espionage, sabotage, and propaganda all sit in the same box, while the link to the actual Moscow client is nearly impossible to prove. That is the important part: instead of the ringing spy stories of the early 2000s, what we get is an opaque networked mechanism that yields very little in the way of scandal. Lowlifes bought up at wholesale prices.
About a year into the investigation, "Katya" was exposed. First Angelique Geray received in the mail a photograph of herself, taken shortly before - a universal language requiring no translation. Then the threats came, directed both at her personally and at the broadcaster. A voicemail message informed her that if she tried to run, she would take a bullet. The trail leads toward a hacking group known for attacks on European websites, and then goes cold. The second journalist on the project was never identified by them. Omnipotence has its limits.
This is not Geray's first investigation of this kind. Before the Russian material, she spent a year inside the German and Austrian neo-Nazi scene under the name Isabel, posing as a caregiver for the elderly. That work produced award-winning reports in Stern and on RTL, a podcast, a book, and above all a criminal case: eight young people, some of them minors, have been on trial since March in the Hamburg Higher Regional Court on charges that include membership in a terrorist organization and attempted murder. The group collapsed because the journalist reported it to the authorities.
In May of this year, the Süddeutsche Zeitung described a twenty-six-page document from the Federal Criminal Police Office, compiled from the messages on the defendants' seized phones. According to the paper, it indicates that Geray at times stepped out of the observer's role and tried to influence events in order to obtain more material. The memo notes that in a chat about an attack on a man the participants believed to be a pedophile, she proposed going along and filming something. That case is still before the court and there is no final clarity. This is what the level of risk in investigative journalism looks like: there is no "giving all sides a hearing" out there, there is you, staking your life to get at the truth. You are the bait. You are not in the newsroom with a coffee and a keyboard, you are with terrorists or Russian agents, at night, alone.
German counterintelligence maintains that recruitment of this kind is continuous and that thousands of people receive such offers, most of whom will never tell anyone. Identifying them all is impossible, because there is nothing to identify: no agent network, no cell, no safe houses. There is an ad, a payment, and a person willing to sell himself for a hundred euros.
The most unsettling thing about Putin's Disposable Agents is not the threat on the answering machine. It is the cheapness. The Cold War was expensive: agents, legends, years of preparation, exposure as catastrophe. What Angelique Geray describes costs about as much as a used phone. Failure here is not a catastrophe but part of the business model of yet another Russian hybrid war, in which hundreds of disposable Katyas fight against their own countries for handouts from distant, invisible clients.
