‘Illegal’ spies: The Kremlin’s secret tool in its war against the West

When Anna Dultseva and Artem Dultsev spoke to reporters from one of Moscow’s biggest television stations to praise the authorities that had rescued them from a Slovenian prison, they did so in very rusty Russian. The married couple, spies in the service of the Kremlin and two of the protagonists of the largest prisoner exchange between Russia and the West since the Cold War, have spent so much time clinging to their false identity — that of an enterprising Argentine couple based in Slovenia — that their mother tongue has suffered. Their children, an 11-year-old girl and an 8-year-old boy, who have been raised at home in Spanish, don’t speak it at all. For spies in such deep cover, speaking Russian, thinking in Russian and even dreaming in Russian is strictly forbidden. And they train for years to perform their duties.

EL PAÍS has spoken to half a dozen intelligence sources and people who were linked to Western agencies to reconstruct part of the Dultsevs’ journey, and the way in which those who, like them, are illegal spies in the employ of the Kremlin, for example, operate. These are agents who work under a false identity — most of the time with foreign citizenship and with no ties to Russia — and without the diplomatic cover that legal spies — those linked to embassies and other governmental organizations who enjoy immunity if they are uncovered — are afforded.

A fundamental espionage tool in the era of the Soviet Union, illegal spies have never ceased to be part of Moscow’s playbook in its war against the West. Kremlinologists believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was a spy in the Soviet KGB and later head of its successor agency, the FSB, revitalized the program and has always held special respect for such operatives. The training and education of a good illegal spy, recounted Soviet spy master 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 American pilot Gary Powers on a Berlin bridge in 1962, an episode that would inspire the movie Bridge of Spies. In 2010, a number of sleeper agents were exchanged in another historic swap. Among them was another couple, Elena Vavilova and Andrei Bezrukov, who for years had been living under the identities of Tracey Ann Foley and Donald Heathfield, a bored married Boston couple on who the hit series The Americans would be based.

Illegal spies have come back into greater prominence after the West expelled hundreds of Russian diplomats and broke up much of the Kremlin’s legal spy network following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Since then, Russia has been trying to rebuild that network with new agents and to activate those it had been placing on the ground over the last two decades, sometimes sleeper cells or intelligence-gathering cells waiting for a more concrete mission. At the same time the Western intelligence services, which had some of them on their radar already, have set about attempting to capture them.

Russian illegal agents have often used Latin American countries such as Argentina, Peru, or Brazil to create their new identities, making deceased babies disappear 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 varied and multicultural continent.

Artem, aka Ludwig Gisch, and Anna, aka María Rosa Mayer Muñoz, over the course of a decade created the chapters of what in intelligence jargon is known as a “legend,” the cover story of illegal spies. The Foreign Espionage Service (SVR) agents — Dultseva is a senior officer — married before deploying, as is usual among illegal spies, who mimic each other better if they work in pairs.

They arrived in Argentina separately in 2012. Dultsev, with his corresponding certificates, claimed to be the son of an Argentine and an Austrian born in Namibia. Dultseva claimed to be a Mexican born in Greece. Both gained Argentine citizenship in 2014. In 2017, they moved to Slovenia, which they used as a base to move around Europe. Anna opened an internet sales art gallery and Artem founded a small IT consultancy, both low-level and with very modest incomes.

When Slovenian authorities arrested them in December 2022, they found hundreds of thousands of euros in new banknotes hidden in a secret compartment in their refrigerator and a highly complex message encryption program on their computers with which they communicated with their handler in Moscow, according to the Slovenian intelligence services.

Intelligence sources suspect that they not only collected information but also acted as intermediaries to contact, pay, and assist Russian agents and even mercenaries in the field and on “sensitive” missions. It is a formula increasingly being used by the Kremlin in view of the difficulty of deploying its military intelligence (GRU) agents — who carry out everything from cyber-attacks to poisonings or assassinations — in Europe due to increased surveillance. In the age of the Internet and social networks, “placing” an illegal agent and giving them a new identity is extremely difficult, but it is still profitable for the Kremlin to have someone on the ground, not only to inform and make small arrangements — as intermediaries for legal spies, who have greater difficulty of movement, for example — but also to assess the environment and the subjective perception of everyday 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, also vanished.

Then there is María Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera, a Peruvian who made a name for herself in southern Italy as a jewelry designer and socialite, who frequented the power circles of Naples and even managed to befriend the staff of the joint NATO allied forces command in that city, but who was in reality an illegal GRU spy who had previously operated in Paris. Kuhfeldt Rivera vanished at the end of 2018, shortly after an investigation by the specialized media outlet Bellingcat that uncovered some of her handlers.

Among the 10 released prisoners — including the Dultsevs’ two children — who arrived in Moscow on August 1, where they were received with honors by Putin, were the spy-hitman Vadim Krasikov, sentenced to life imprisonment in Germany; the Russian Hispanic Pablo González (or Pavel Rubtsov), accused of espionage in Poland, and Mikhail Mikushin, or by his Brazilian alias José Assis Giammaría, who was prosecuted in Norway for collaborating with Russian intelligence.

Their handlers in Moscow, where they are considered patriots regardless of whether their mission has been a failure, are now trying to estimate what the returnees might have revealed. Most of them will never be sent on another mission again, not even inside Russia. Some, as was the case with Vavilova and her husband Bezrukov, will be installed as senior officials at large Russian companies, or deputies in parliament, or TV presenters. “When Putin received us on arrival in Moscow, he tried to encourage us, he remarked that although the mission was over, we still had years ahead of us and we could do something interesting and useful in the country,” Vavilova told EL PAÍS in 2021. The work is not over, but this time, for the celebrated returnees, the mission will be different.

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