When Anna Dultseva and Artem Dultsev spoke in front of the cameras of one of the largest television channels in Moscow to praise the Russia that rescued From a Slovenian prison, they did so in very rusty Russian. The Kremlin spy couple, two of the protagonists of the largest prisoner exchange between Russia and the West since the Cold War, have spent so long clinging to their false identity, a couple of Argentine entrepreneurs living in Slovenia, that their native language has suffered. Their children, an 11-year-old girl and an 8-year-old boy, who have been raised at home in Spanish, do not even speak it. For some spies with such deep cover as theirs, speaking Russian, thinking Russian and even dreaming in Russian is strictly forbidden. And they train for years to do so.
Morning Express has spoken with half a dozen intelligence sources and people who were linked to Western services to reconstruct part of the Dultsevs’ journey. It also explains the way of operating of those who, like them, are illegal spies Kremlin agents who operate under a false identity — most often under foreign citizenship and without ties to Russia — and without the diplomatic cover that spies do have. legal, people linked to embassies and other government organizations, who enjoy immunity if discovered.
A fundamental tool of espionage in the Soviet Union, illegal spies have never ceased to be part of Moscow’s fundamental playbook and its war against the West. Kremlinologists Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was a spy with the Soviet KGB and later head of its successor agency, the FSB, is believed to have revived the program and has always had a special respect for such spies. Training and nurturing a good illegal, said Soviet spymaster Yuri Drozdov, can take up to a decade.
One of the most famous was Rudolf Abel, arrested in New York in 1957 and exchanged with the USSR for the American pilot Gary Powers on a bridge in Berlin in 1962. It is a historical episode that would inspire the film Bridge of Spies. In 2010, a handful of illegals were exchanged in another of those historic swaps. Among them was another couple, Elena Vavilova and Andrei Bezrukov, who for years had been pretending to be Tracey Ann Foley and Donald Heathfield, a bored couple from Boston, on whom the successful series would be based. The Americans.
Illegals have regained great importance after the West expelled hundreds of Russian diplomats and dynamited much of the spy network following the large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. legal from the Kremlin.
Knowing what’s happening outside means understanding what’s going to happen inside, so don’t miss anything.
KEEP READING
Since then, Russia has been trying to reconstruct this network with new agents and to activate the illegal agents it had been placing on the ground over the last two decades, sometimes as sleeper cells or intelligence gatherers, awaiting a more specific mission. At the same time, Western intelligence services, which already had some of them under their radar, have been busy capturing them.
Russian illegal agents have often used Latin American countries such as Argentina, Peru and Brazil to create their new identity, removing deceased babies from the registers to steal their names, bribing civil registry officials in remote provinces to obtain certificates, and taking advantage of the cultural mix of a diverse and multicultural continent.
Artem, alias Ludwig Gischand Anna, alias Maria Rosa Mayer Munozspent more than a decade creating chapters of what is known in the jargon of the intelligence services as a legend, the front story of illegal spies. The couple of agents of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) – Dultseva is a higher-ranking officer – married before being deployed, as is usual among illegals, who blend in better if they work in pairs.
They arrived in Argentina in 2012, each on their own. He, with his corresponding certificates, claimed to be the son of an Argentine woman and an Austrian born in Namibia. She said she was Mexican born in Greece. Both obtained Argentine citizenship in 2014. In 2017, they moved to Europe, to Slovenia, which they used as a base to move around the continent. Anna opened an art gallery for online sales and Artem founded a small IT consultancy. Both were low-level and had very modest incomes.
When Slovenian authorities arrested them one morning in December 2022, they found hundreds of thousands of euros in new banknotes hidden in a secret compartment of their refrigerator and a highly complex message encryption program on their computers with which they communicated with their contact in Moscow, according to the small European country’s intelligence services.
Intelligence sources suspect that they not only collected information, but also acted as intermediaries to contact, pay and assist Russian field agents and those assigned to “sensitive” missions, and even mercenaries. This is a formula increasingly used by the Kremlin in view of the difficulty of its military intelligence agents (GRU), who carry out everything from cyberattacks to poisonings or assassinations, being deployed throughout Europe due to increasing controls. In the era of the Internet and social networks, “placing” an illegal and giving him a new identity is extremely difficult, but the Kremlin still benefits from having someone on the ground, not only to inform and make small arrangements – as intermediaries for legal spies, who have greater difficulty moving around – but also to assess the environment and the subjective perception of daily life.
The story of the Dultsevs, captured on a tip-off to Slovenia from another Western intelligence service, is similar to that of Austrian-born Brazilian Gerhard Campos Wittich and his Greek wife, Maria Tsalla, another pair of Russian agents who worked separately on different continents. Campos — whose real surname is Chmirev — was in Brazil, where he had a company and another partner, who launched a huge search through social media when he disappeared early last year after receiving a tip-off that his cover was in jeopardy. At the same time, Tsalla, or Irina Romanova, a woman who had claimed Greek citizenship using the identity of a baby who was listed as having died on a small Greek island in 1991 and who left behind a successful shop in central Athens and a Greek boyfriend, vanished.
Or the story of Maria Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera, a Peruvian who made a name for herself in southern Italy as a jewelry designer and socialitewho frequented the power circles of Naples and even managed to make friends with the staff of the joint command of NATO allied forces in that city, but who was in fact an illegal member of the GRU who had previously operated in Paris. Kuhfeldt Rivera disappeared at the end of 2018, shortly after an investigation by the specialized media Bellingcatwhich uncovered some of its controllers.
Among the ten exchanged persons – including the two sons of the Dultsevs – who arrived in Moscow on August 1, where they were received with honours by Putin, were also the spy-hitman Vadim Krasikov, sentenced to life imprisonment in Germany; the Spanish-Russian accused of espionage in Poland Pablo González (or Pavel Rubtsov), and Mikhail Mikushin, or by his Brazilian alias, José Assis Giammaría, prosecuted in Norway for collaborating with Russian intelligence.
Intelligence sources describe Mikushin-Giammaria as another illegal who had spent years studying at universities in Canada and had recently been working as an academic in Norway, where he covered the Arctic, a major issue for Moscow. The alleged spy was arrested in October 2022. Like his colleagues, he was hot on the trail of Western intelligence — which sometimes delays arrests to gather more information, try to get the agent to cooperate or uncover more spies.
Their handlers in Moscow, where they are considered patriots, regardless of whether their mission has failed, try to estimate what the returnees have revealed. Most will not have any other missions. Not even within Russia. Some, as was the case with Vavilova and her husband Bezrukov, will be senior officials in large Russian companies, or MPs, or television presenters. “When Putin received us upon arrival in Moscow, he tried to encourage us, he stressed that although the mission had ended, we still had years ahead of us and we could do something interesting and useful in the country,” Vavilova told Morning Express in 2021. The work is not over, but this time, for the famous returnees, the mission will be different.
Follow all the international information atFacebook andXor inour weekly newsletter.
