Welcome to Spycast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum.

I'm your host, Sasha Ingberg, and each week I take you into the shadows of espionage,

intelligence, and covert operations across the globe.

They were a spy cell like no other, operating from quiet British suburbs, hailing from Bulgaria

and working on behalf of Russia.

Their handler dubbed them the minions, and their plots stretched across Europe and spanned

honey traps, abductions, and murder. At the time of this recording,

six were convicted and awaited sentencing. To parse out the case, I spoke with Gordon Carrera,

a British author and co-host of The Rest is Classified podcast. I got to get started by asking about the group's name, The Minions. How did the

name come about? It is kind of crazy that they're called the Minions. It's not a made-up name.

I mean, they used it themselves. I mean, that's what's kind of wild about this group,

is that the leader of the group had, you know, in his phone

contacts the names for some of the other members of the group as the minions. And that's how he

referred to some of them, which is a kind of dismissive way of referring to them, but also kind of

funny as well. They even found some minion themed kind of spy gadget tree in the midst of this story.

And in one case, they had a minion soft toy with a video surveillance camera in it.

Not quite sure where and when they used that.

You had mentioned the Bulgarian who created the nickname, a Bulgarian named Orlin Roussev.

He was the one who recruited them. What do we know about him?

Very interesting, because he is someone who came to the UK from Bulgaria around 2009.

Now, he does actually have a technical background in engineering, communications, and surveillance

tech.

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