Swiss police foiled the beginnings of a suspected Russian spy operation five months before world leaders swarmed Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum.
Police questioned two Russian men in the secluded Alpine town in August after an unusually long stay at the high-end ski resort hosting the annual conference, according to the Financial Times. The men claimed they were protected by diplomatic status but were not registered as official diplomats with Bern.
“It is true that we checked two Russian citizens in Davos, and they identified themselves with diplomatic passports, but we could not ascertain any reason to detain them. They were allowed to go,” a police spokeswoman said.
Swiss officials and police suspected the pair of being Russian intelligence agents, posing as plumbers, who were there to install surveillance equipment around town to monitor the private conversations of world leaders and wealthy attendees during the forum taking place this week, Zurich’s Tages-Anzeiger newspaper reported.
A spokesman for the Russian embassy in Bern dismissed that the notion that the men were undercover.
“Diplomatic passports are given to high-ranking officials, not to manual laborers,” he told Reuters. “I think this was probably a dumb joke.”
In 2018, Swiss media, citing a confidential intelligence report, claimed that 1 in 4 Russian diplomats based in Switzerland was a spy. The Russian ambassador said those allegations were “based on assumptions.”
