By Leah S. Dunaief
If you like spy stories, read on. The riveting part about this one is that it is real. The account jumped off the front page of The New York Times to me on Tuesday and speaks to the state of the world today. The recent large East-West prisoner exchange unearthed this tale that could be a streaming series but is reality.
Slovenia, once part of Yugoslavia, is a small country in central Europe. It is bordered by Austria and Hungary on the north, Croatia on the east, the Italian port city of Trieste on the southwest and it has coastline along the Gulf of Venice. Although controlled by the Soviet Union for most of post WWII, it is now a member of NATO and the European Union.
It was there that Russian Anna Dultseva and her husband, Artem Dultsev, set up an online art gallery and passed themselves off as Argentines. He started a bogus high tech business. Using the name Maria Rosa Mayer Munos, she organized frequent trips to Britain and even arranged for art exhibitions in Edinburgh.
Tipped off by intelligence in Britain, the couple was arrested in December 2022 in their comfortable home near the capital, Ljubljana, as they were communicating with Moscow, using special equipment that bypassed phone and internet lines.
Their lives must have been constantly tense for the wife and husband. They had two children, a daughter, now12, a son, now 9, and a small dog. They kept to themselves, spoke to no one, and seldom had visitors, according to neighbors in the suburb. The children attended the nearby British International School, and the family spoke Spanish and English at home.
Although people sometimes gossiped about them, wondering what they were doing there, they were mostly ignored because they did not cause trouble. Their financial filings might have sparked interest, since they showed little income, yet they lived in a three-story house with a small garden and a wooden fence and sent their children to a school that charged $10,000 per pupil. The art they sold was the kind bought in China for little money.
The authorities are still trying to figure out what the couple was up to since their arrival in 2017, although probably not fully activated until war with Ukraine five years later. Large sums of cash were found in the house, causing speculation that they were paying off a network of sleeper agents and other Russian operations throughout Europe.
Apparently Russian intelligence has an elaborate network of deep-cover sleeper spies trained to impersonate citizens of other countries by Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, the SVR. This is, apparently, a real life version of a television series called “The Americans,” that was in turn inspired by the arrest in 2010 of a ring of sleeper spies in the United States.
According to NYT reporter, Andrew Higgins, Russia has a long history of fielding such undercover spies “who burrow deep into target countries over many years.” This is something that President Putin has supported since his days in the K.G.B. These “illegal” spies have no diplomatic cover, no obvious connection to Russia, and suffer the consequences on their own if caught.
Whatever the pair did is considered to have been extremely important because, when they were released, were rejoined by their children, and landed in Moscow, they were greeted by a smiling Putin, who addressed the children with the Spanish words, “Buenas noches.”
They were also greeted by Sergey Naryshkin, the head of the SVR intelligence agency. If unaware of their parents’ real jobs, as the Kremlin asserted, those must have been two very confused children.