#24 2026 Über die Radikalisierung der Karin Kneissl - mit Elisalex Henckel-Donnersmarck und Paul Koren

·1 hr 8 min·5 clips

A man identifying himself as a former KGB officer says he rode horses near the Eiffel Tower with Karin Kneissl, called it 'a special time,' and filed her to Moscow as a promising KGB contact.

1. Ganz offen gesagt presents an interview with the journalists behind Kniefall, a podcast investigating the radicalisation of former Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl. 2. Guests are Elisalex Henckel-Donnersmarck and Paul Koren of the Austrian investigative outlet Datum; host is Stefan Lasnik. 3. The episode asks how a respected Middle East scholar from a conservative Austrian background became a full-time propagandist for an authoritarian state. 4. A spring 2022 EU Parliament report on foreign interference explicitly named Kneissl alongside Gerhard Schröder as examples of Western politicians used by Russia and China to deepen political divisions and influence elections. 5. Kneissl's international entanglement began in the late 1980s when she was wrongly suspected of espionage abroad and found the Austrian embassy unhelpful — a grievance she later wrote about openly and which established a pattern of remembered slights. 6. Around 1991 at the Paris ENA, a man identifying himself as Sergei Shiryanov claimed to have been posted by the KGB, cultivated a close relationship with Kneissl including horseback riding near the Eiffel Tower, and wrote her up as a valuable potential contact for Moscow. 7. Kneissl calls Shiryanov a KGB man but denies any relationship; the researchers found photos and a Christmas card contradicting her denial, while a Russian security historian flagged a Latin-script letter on Shiryanov's published KGB ID as suspicious. 8. The researchers apply the M.I.C.E. framework — Money, Ideology, Coercion, Ego — and find evidence for three of the four levers: recurring financial difficulties, ideological respect for Soviet diplomacy developed during Middle East work, and documented hypersensitivity to perceived professional slights. 9. In the Middle East she developed lasting admiration for Soviet diplomatic competence and a corresponding distrust of American foreign policy, which she summarised in interviews as the US approach of 'hit and run.' 10. Her 2012 book Testosteron macht Politik argued that young men from the Middle East arriving in Europe carried an excess of testosterone due to frustrated social status, drawing criticism for biological determinism; the 2015 refugee crisis gave her theses mainstream attention and connected her to the FPÖ. 11. In summer 2014, three months after Russia's annexation of Crimea, Kneissl travelled to Moscow with a friend to visit former First Lady Margot Klestil-Löffler — her first trip to Russia, according to her own account, during which the Crimea annexation was 'not a topic.' 12. Klestil-Löffler had a direct personal connection to Putin dating to 2004, when the Klestil presidential couple visited Putin's dacha and received two Labrador puppies from his dog Connie — the same dog used to intimidate Angela Merkel. 13. Kneissl appointed Klestil-Löffler as her Russia adviser when she became Foreign Minister in 2017; multiple former diplomats told the researchers that Klestil-Löffler was the person in Austria with the most direct line to Putin and was both highly competent and widely avoided. 14. Inside the Foreign Ministry, Kneissl replaced the Secretary-General with Johannes Peterl, a figure with prior FPÖ connections, after estrangement from the official she blamed for her 1980s embassy incident. 15. Around April 2018, Peterl commissioned Egisto Ott — now on trial for alleged Russian intelligence links — to draw organisational charts for a planned shadow intelligence service inside the Foreign Ministry, with personnel including Ott, his colleague Anton H., and Jan Maselek. 16. The timing of the shadow-service planning coincided with the legally later-invalidated BVT raid, which prosecutors now treat as part of a coordinated effort to destabilise Austrian domestic intelligence and redirect it toward Russian interests. 17. Kneissl's personality, as described by former students and colleagues, combines genuine linguistic talent, passion for her subject, and an ability to make complex topics accessible — alongside an extreme sensitivity to perceived disrespect that she openly describes in her own books. 18. The episode is a structured investigation interview, methodical in tone, with the host asking the journalists to reconstruct the timeline and explain the evidential basis for each claim. 19. Listeners interested in intelligence history, Austrian foreign policy, Russian influence operations, or investigative podcast journalism will find the episode substantively dense. 20. Listeners requiring prior knowledge of Austrian politics and the FPÖ-OVP coalition period will get more from the episode than those encountering these names for the first time.

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