VIENNA - For decades, the city's reputation as the capital of spies — eavesdropping on wiretapped calls, swapping secrets in crowded cafés and mingling with diplomats over canapés — has been as much a part of its identity as Wiener schnitzel and Sachertorte.
Many Austrians accepted it as the price of hosting major international organizations like the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and the International Atomic Energy Agency, alongside more than 120 foreign missions. Others saw it as an inevitable consequence of Austria’s long-standing policy of neutrality.
Then Russia pushed too far.
Over the past few years, the Russian Embassy on Reisnerstrasse sprouted such a thicket of antennae that locals dubbed it the “forest.” And with that, looking the other way was no longer an option.
In response, the government announced it would tighten its espionage laws, making life harder for the estimated 7,000 spies believed to roam the city.
Under current legislation, foreign agents can generally operate with impunity unless they are caught spying on Austria itself — a loophole experts say has helped cement Vienna’s status as the world’s premier playground for foreign spies.
“It needs to close the loophole,” said former CIA officer Bjorn Beam, now head of geopolitics and technology consulting at Arcano and adjunct professor at IE University.
The government now appears determined to do just that.
“Espionage will constitute a criminal offense where it is directed not only against Austria, but also against the European Union or international organizations based in Austria,” the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs told The Parliament in an email. It added that any attacks on critical infrastructure and cyberattacks “will be subject to more severe penalties.”
While many see the break with Austria’s traditionally loose approach to foreign intelligence as necessary, the bigger question is whether Vienna is prepared to devote the resources needed to make the new rules more than a symbolic warning.
Austria's break with Moscow
The overhaul reflects Austria's desire to get tough on Russia as relations between the two countries — once regarded as particularly close — have deteriorated since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“This would have never happened before the war, just like the expulsion of Russian diplomats,” said Gerhard Mangott, a political scientist at the University of Innsbruck.
Austria's closeness to Russia goes back to the Cold War, when Vienna became a natural meeting spot between the East and the West. But economic ties helped cement the bond too, as Austria began importing vast amounts of Soviet gas in 1968, turning the country into a major hub for Russian gas exports into Central Europe.
In 2018, just four years after Russia occupied and annexed Crimea and backed separatists in Eastern Ukraine, former Austrian foreign minister Karin Kneissl drew international criticism for dancing with Russian President Vladimir Putin at her wedding. Kneissl moved to Russia in 2023.
But that special relationship is fading.
In May, Austria expelled three Russian diplomats accused of espionage involving satellite equipment, bringing the total number of Russian embassy staff expelled since 2022 to 14, according to state broadcaster ORF.
Despite the law's broad wording, there’s little doubt the amendment is primarily aimed at Russia, Mangott said. Vienna hosts numerous intelligence services from friendly countries — notably the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany — which are unlikely to be affected by the stricter legislation.
“The Austrian intelligence community is very much dependent on information from friendly services, so when [Foreign Affairs Minister Beate] Meinl-Reisinger says that she's going after all the spies working in Vienna, that’s simply not true,” said Mangott.
Rather, the tougher stance is an effort to regain the trust of friendly intelligence agencies after the pro-Russia Freedom Party of Austria entered government from 2017 to 2019 and caused a near cessation of intelligence sharing.
For a while the FPÖ’s entry into government, compounded by a string of espionage scandals, made the Austrian intelligence community “very isolated,” Mangott said.
Austria’s new Russia policy has also reignited discussions about the country’s neutrality. While the country remains constitutionally neutral and outside NATO, it has backed EU sanctions against Russia and joined a broader European push to strengthen defense.
For its part, Moscow has repeatedly called out Austria for abandoning the principle of neutrality it adopted in 1955. According to Mangott, Moscow has a point.
“It’s a correct position what the Russians are taking. Except for the letter of the law and limitations on military alliances and military presence in our country, there's no more neutrality policy.”
A city built for spies
Espionage has shaped Austria for centuries. The Congress of Vienna in 1814-15, which reshaped Europe's geography after the Napoleonic Wars, gave the city an early taste of what it means to be a diplomatic jamboree and a hot spot for intelligence gathering. During the Cold War, Austria's neutrality and location on the edge of the Iron Curtain turned its capital into something of an overt playground for foreign agents, who could often operate without too much anxiety about getting arrested.
Yet, until recently, most Austrians paid little attention to the clandestine activity taking place around them.
Jascha Novak, who has led spy-themed walking tours since 2019, said that in the early days, locals “were really not aware of anything,” and often “blown away” by the country’s permissive attitude to foreign agents.
A series of high-profile scandals involving the Austrian establishment has since made the public less naive. One case, above all, has underscored the extent of Russian intelligence penetration of the Austrian state.
In May, Egisto Ott, a former officer at Austria’s domestic intelligence agency — since reorganized as the Directorate State Protection and Intelligence Service — was found guilty of spying for the Kremlin.
Ott was accused of passing classified information to dissidents, investigative journalists and a Russian intelligence defector. Most importantly, prosecutors established that Ott was working for Jan Marsalek, the fugitive former Wirecard executive who was later exposed as a Russian spy orchestrating espionage operation across Europe.
To Novak, the embarrassment from the succession of scandals made it politically impossible for the government to keep ignoring the legal loophole.
Espionage central, still?
If enacted as planned, the tougher law could begin to erode Vienna's status as a spy haven.
For starters, recruitment would come at a much higher cost, said Beam, the former CIA officer. “That changes the cost of any type of recruitment, of what it actually means to do the spot, assess, develop and recruit a source on the ground.”
But the measure also needs teeth to have any meaningful impact. “You still have to have the intelligence services and the police to have the funding [in order] to be able to crack down on Russian operations in Vienna,” Beam said.
“If that's not met with true financing of personnel and intelligence equipment, you find yourself with a law that puts some extra stress on those operating in that space, but lacks the ability for true enforcement.”
So far, Austria isn’t planning to increase its counterintelligence spending, the Ministry told The Parliament.
That’s one reason experts doubt that Vienna’s days as a spy nest are truly numbered.
“Vienna will remain a spy capital as it’s been for the past 80 years,” Mangott said, despite predicting that the tougher framework will be used against Russia. “But the Russians will still remain.”
Thomas Riegler, author of , echoed the sentiment: “There are simply too many valuable and tempting targets for secret information collection.”
To Beam, Austria’s push to ramp up its spy-catching abilities could even prove a double-edged sword. If Vienna becomes a more hostile environment for foreign intelligence services, he said, it may also become a more attractive target for their operations.
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