It's not hard to find the spot from where an alleged Russian spy set out to launch a cyber-attack in The Hague.
Alexei Morenets kept the receipt for his taxi to the airport. At the address marked on it, there's a young soldier in uniform guarding the entrance.
When I ask whether it's a base for Russian military intelligence agency, the GRU – a cyber-warfare hub as Western intelligence agencies claim – the soldier makes a call and then tells me to leave the premises immediately. I don't hang around.
But the suspected GRU agents just uncovered in the Netherlands left a trail of evidence online as well as on paper.
Of the four men caught trying to hack the wifi network of the chemical weapons watchdog, the OPCW, the BBC found two giving defence ministry buildings as their address on official documents.
One of those documents is a vehicle registration database. The Bellingcat online investigations team later found 305 cars listed there, linked to the same military facility.
That suggests an extraordinary security breach for a supposedly secret service.
“They could have used their home addresses but they wanted privileges – not to pay fines for violating traffic rules,” Alexander Gabuev of the Carnegie Moscow…
