From a run-down British seaside resort, Russian spies launched honeytraps and espionage plots

The Haydee Guesthouse, with its worn-out carpets and tidy, blue-trimmed Victorian façade, is an unlikely headquarters for Russia-backed high-stakes espionage.

LONDON — The Haydee Guesthouse, with its worn-out carpets and grandmotherly Victorian façade, makes for an unlikely base for Russian-backed high-stakes espionage. 

But for years, the guesthouse in Great Yarmouth, a run-down resort town on Britain’s east coast, played host to a freelance spy ring orchestrating cross-continental honeytraps, kidnappings, and murder plots targeting high-profile dissidents and sensitive military sites.

The details, which seem pulled straight from a spy novel, unfolded in British courts last week after three Bulgarians were found guilty of conspiracy to spy, members of a Russian ring operating from their base in the United Kingdom. 

Gabriela Gaberova, 30, a beautician tapped to carry out honeytraps; Katrin Ivanova, 33, a lab assistant who was also found guilty of "possessing identity documents with improper intention;" and Tihomir Ivanchev, 39, a painter-decorator and Gaberova’s former partner, made up the ragtag group of amateur operatives who managed to carry out espionage operations for the Kremlin on what prosecutors described as "an industrial scale."

Their handler, a fellow Bulgarian named Biser Dzhambazov, called himself "Mad Max" and doubled as a medical courier as well as a knot in the spy ring's tangled romantic subplot.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/bulgarian-spies-uk-russia-honeytraps-espionage-plots-rcna195448

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