When 11-year-old Sofia and her brother Gabriel, 8, stepped off the plane at Moscow’s Vnukuvo airport last Thursday, they were met by an unfamiliar balding man in a dark suit.
“Buenas noches,” he said, addressing them in Spanish, the language they spoke at home.
Surrounded by media, security and other functionaries, he embraced Sofia and her mother, handing them flowers and welcoming them to the Russian capital. It must have been a bewildering sight. Later, according to the Kremlin, the children asked their parents who the man there to greet them on the red carpet had been. Vladimir Putin, they explained.
It was the end of a journey the children will never forget – one in which they became part of the largest Russia-US prisoner exchange since the Cold War. Until they made the trip to Moscow, Sofia and Gabriel had thought they were part of an Argentinian family living in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Their mother was Maria Rosa Mayer Muños. Her story was that she had fled Buenos Aires after suffering an armed robbery, and ran an online art gallery. Her husband, their father, was Ludwig Gisch, the founder of an IT start-up. The family lived an ordinary suburban life in Črnuče, on the northern outskirts of the city. They spoke English and German when they were out; at home they conversed in perfect Spanish. They drove a Kia. The children went to the British International School.
But behind the facade, their parents were in fact elite Russian spies and the children’s entire lives had been a lie. “Maria” was, and is, Anna Valernevna Dultseva, and “Ludvig”, Artem Viktorovich Dultsev. Both are officers in Russia’s equivalent to MI6, the SVR.
The pair had painstakingly built their cover story. They arrived in Argentina on tourist visas in 2012, got married and had their two children. “They were very polite, respectful,” Jamoneria del Virrey, the owner of a Buenos Aires delicatessen, told the Wall Street Journal. “They always paid in cash.”
They moved to Slovenia in 2017. Ljubljana was an ideal base, an out-of-the-way European capital, where counterintelligence agents were less likely to be snooping around than in London or Paris, but with easy access to the rest of the continent. Officials say they used it as a base to run money and instructions to other Russian agents in Italy, Croatia and further afield. They also reportedly targeted ACER, the Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators, the Ljubljana-based EU body which has become increasingly important during Russia’s war with Ukraine.
In 2022, a few months after Moscow launched its February invasion of its neighbour, Slovenia’s spy agency, SOVA, was tipped off by an allied organisation that they ought to investigate Mayer Muños and Gisch. In December of that year, police burst into their house in the middle of the night to arrest them. Investigators found hundreds of thousands of euros stashed in a secret compartment inside their refrigerator, along with encrypted computer equipment so complex that neither Slovenian nor US operatives could crack it.
While their parents languished in jail, awaiting trial, Sofia and Gabriel were sent to live with a foster family. On Wednesday, the day before the exchange, they were each sentenced to 19 months in prison for espionage, waived for time already spent behind bars.
Come Thursday, they were all on their way to Moscow. According to Dimitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman, the children did not know they were Russian until they got on the plane.
“The children of the undercover agents asked their parents yesterday who had greeted them,” he said, adding that “they did not even know who Putin is”, and that the job of these spies entailed “making such sacrifices for the sake of their work and their dedication to their service”.
Other sources have suggested that the children had been given contingency plans in case of their parents’ arrest, implying they knew about their real identities. But whatever the truth, these are undoubtedly turbulent times.
The family’s story marks one of the most high-profile cases of Russian “illegals” since December 1991, when the Soviet Union finally collapsed. Where “legal” spies use a job in the government or diplomatic services as cover, illegals live as regular members of society. They spend years infiltrating the target region, building complete false lives which enable them to move about freely. They can fulfil a range of roles: looking for possible recruits, cultivating information sources and running missions for spies operating under diplomatic cover, who are typically closely surveilled by intelligence agencies in their host countries. It’s the kind of work that has been dramatised in programmes such as The Americans, about illegals in America in the 1980s, and the French spy series Le Bureau, in which agents go to extraordinary lengths to create plausible back stories for themselves.
“It’s amazing that people are willing to be so reckless with childrens’ lives as to force them to live a lie,” says Gordon Corera, the author of Russians Among Us: Sleeper Cells, Ghost Stories and the Hunt for Putin’s Agents, a 2020 book about illegals. “But it’s something they’ve long done. Illegals are highly prized in Soviet and Russian culture, even if it’s not quite clear how useful they are, so great effort is expended into getting them back if they’re ever captured.”
The use of illegals was pioneered by Joseph Stalin, but has been revived by Putin, a former KGB officer. Such agents are considered prestigious, part of a tradition of Russian spycraft dating back to Kim Philby and beyond, and operate on the frontlines of Moscow’s shadow war with its Western rivals.
“Putin has talked about how he used to work with illegals in East Germany as part of his own mythology,” Corera adds. “The exchange was him trying to associate himself with these people, who are seen as the elite of Moscow spies. They take getting them back very seriously, even though that requires revealing that they were deep cover spies.”
This kind of spy-work is costly, time-consuming and fraught with risk. Corera says that agents are typically recruited young and given years of training to help build their alias. “They normally pick them around university age, because they figure that’s when someone doesn’t have too much of a past and their personality can still be moulded,” he says.
“They will make them effectively disappear and train them for three or four years with people who have lived in that other country. It’s not just about speaking the language. It’s understanding the customs and culture, knowing how to refer to sports teams, the kind of tiny details they need to be immersed in to live under a foreign cover. In some cases, couples are recruited, in others people are put together as couples. They are told, effectively ‘this is your spouse, hope you get on’.” Blind dates do not come much more intense.”
Apart from Dultsev and his wife, the most famous post-Cold War case featuring illegals involved the exposure of a major network of spies in 2010 as part of “Operation Ghost Stories”. The ten Russian sleeper agents uncovered were eventually swapped for four people imprisoned in Russia over reported contact with Western intelligence agencies. The Russian group included Anna Chapman, born Anna Vasilyevna Kushchenko, the red-haired sometime model who married a British man, Alex Chapman, who claimed to have no idea about her true identity. Among the four who came in the other direction was Sergei Skripal, who in 2018 was the victim of an attempted assassination with a Soviet-era nerve agent, along with his daughter Yulia, in the Salisbury Poisonings.
Andrei Soldatov, a Russian security expert, says the obsession with illegals dates back to the golden age of Cold War espionage. “Stalin started training Russian nationals to be British to make another Philby, but it’s impossible,” he says. “You cannot create Kim Philby out of a guy who was born in Siberia. You can’t get him into a proper school or a proper family.
“So if you look carefully at the history of Russian illegals, it’s always the same story. They never pretend to be British in Britain. They are always foreigners. In Slovenia it’s the same story. Because they cannot integrate into local society.”
Illegals have become more important to Russian intelligence since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. More than 700 “legal” spies have been expelled worldwide, placing greater importance on the work done by deep-cover agents who operate hidden in plain sight, in civilian society. Soon after Dultsev and Dultseva were arrested, two other suspected Russian operatives, Maria Tsalla and Ludwig Campos Wittich, fled their lives in Athens and Rio de Janeiro. As with Anna Chapman, they left behind colleagues and romantic partners who reportedly had no inkling of their true identity. Illegals have also been recently identified in Bulgaria, Norway, the Netherlands and Czechia.
“The advantage of an illegal is that they can go places where a Russian can’t,” says Corera. “In the past few years it might be much harder for a Russian to turn up at a party of influential people and talk to them to find out who might be recruited. But if you’re an ‘Argentinian’, that might be a lot easier. Russia keeps wanting to use them, even if the value isn’t always obvious. And there’s an element, bureaucratically, where the leaders of the Russian foreign intelligence service want to be able to tell Putin ‘don’t worry, we have illegals all over the West ready to be activated.’”
The Slovenian case is not the first time children have been involved. Andrey Bezrukov and Yelena Vavilova were among the illegals arrested in 2010, living in the US and pretending to be Canadians under the names Donald Heathfield and Tracey Lee Ann Foley. It was the case that most directly inspired The Americans. Vavilova worked at an estate agency and travelled under a British passport. Bezrukov got a degree from Harvard. They had two sons, then aged 16 and 20, who claimed that they had never known their parents’ identities. Although their Canadian citizenship was initially revoked, Alexander Vavilov, the younger of the two, had his reinstated on judicial appeal. His case, and the one involving Sofia and Gabriel, raise the question of how much a child can be held responsible for the actions of a parent.
“[The sons] didn’t want to live in Russia,” says Soldatov. “And it’s completely understandable. In theory you have a whole family doing a job for your country, but in reality it has been a big problem [for the intelligence agencies]. I asked an official once what happened to people who wanted to stay after their mission. He said the basic rule is that if illegals are successful, the SVR would allow them to remain in the country where they spied. I was surprised. You have these people subverting a country for decades but they want to stay.
“He said ‘they get used to it, they have friends, they’re completely settled. It would be traumatic for them to relocate. So we let them live their private lives in the country they were posted.’ If they were driven by patriotic reasons they would be keen to get back to the motherland. But that’s not what’s happening in reality.”
Sofia and Gabriel, he says, will already have suffered from their extraordinary upbringing. “You’re already traumatised, because you don’t have a proper family,” he says. “You don’t have grandparents. It’s impossible. But the children are just collateral damage.”
Artem and Anna have returned to Russia to a hero’s welcome. After long years in the field, their mission is complete. For their blameless children, however, the struggle to understand what has happened to them has only just begun.
