A “quiet” couple leading a monotonous life in a quiet suburb left their friends speechless after it emerged they were high-ranking Russian spies operating a network of European informants for Vladimir Putin.
Ludwig Gisch cycled to his new IT company every day from the pastel-colored house he shared with his wife Maria and their two young children on the outskirts of Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia.
She ran an online art gallery, sent her children to the city’s British International School and was described by a neighbor as a “grey mouse”.
In reality, he was Artem Viktorovich Dultsev and she was Anna Dultseva of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, tasked with undermining Western energy security after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and she was his boss.
“Now we will see how important these people really are to Russia,” one official told the guardian. ‘This is a big game now; It is clear that Slovenia is only a substitute here.”
Ludwig Gisch and his wife María Rosa Mayer Muños were actually Russian spies Artem Viktorovich Dultsev and Anna Valerevna Dultseva.
Dultseva (pictured) ran an online gallery and used exhibitions across Europe as a cover.
The couple had spent a decade scrupulously establishing their covers in an effort to evade detection, arriving in Argentina on tourist visas in 2012, marrying and leaving five years later as citizens.
“They were very polite and respectful,” said Jamonería del Virrey, owner of a delicatessen in Buenos Aires. WSJ. “They always paid in cash.”
Moving to Slovenia in 2017, they behaved like model citizens, paying their taxes on time, ‘keeping to themselves’ and not even charging a parking fine for the white Kia Ceed sedan they were driving.
But an early morning raid on his Llubjana home in 2022 found hundreds of thousands of euros worth of cash hidden in a secret compartment and communications software so heavily encrypted that U.S. intelligence has yet to decrypt his messages to Moscow.
Viktorovich created a LinkedIn profile and an online IT company called DSM&IT, which offers cloud hosting services, and dutifully filed taxes on his declared income of €43,785 in 2021.
Friends who downloaded its software said it contrasted sharply with Moscow’s modern communication link.
“I wasn’t very impressed,” said one. “It was five years behind current technology in Europe or even anything made in Russia.”
Maria, whose real name is Anna Dultseva, made a better presentation of her online gallery Art Gallery 5’14’, posting photographs from exhibitions across Europe, but usually being careful not to be photographed.
“She was always in a good mood and cheerful, and had a lot of fun with other artists,” said Croatian photographer Marko Milić, who met her at an art fair in Zagreb.
The suburban house on the outskirts of the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana, where the couple lived with their two children while spying for Russia.
The couple spent ten years building their elaborate fake identity, five of them in Argentina.
The couple married in Argentina despite having previously been married in Russia.
The couple spoke both English and German with the people who met them.
They claimed that Slovenian was too difficult for them to pronounce, although the researchers suggested that they were concerned that their Russian accent would be expressed in another Slavic language.
At home, the couple spoke Spanish with their children, according to a neighbor who occasionally saw them in the garden.
‘I speak Spanish well and I noticed that she didn’t have a Spanish accent. They were nice, ordinary people, there’s no way they were spies. I think it’s all an invention of the media,’ said the neighbor.
From their base in Slovenia they were able to travel visa-free throughout the European Union developing sources, recruiting informants and establishing links with other agents.
After 10 years of establishing their new identities, it was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 that led to their activation.
They began targeting the EU’s Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER), based just five miles from his home in Llubjana.
“They had been woken up,” said Vojko Volk, Slovenia’s secretary of state for international affairs and national and international security.
Russia supplied just under half of Europe’s gas on the eve of the invasion, earning billions of dollars in foreign currency.
But European politicians were under extreme pressure to drastically reduce their dependence on Russian energy and Moscow was desperate for intelligence from ACER.
The case has drawn comparisons to the Emmy Award-winning spy drama The Americans.
His two spies were back in Buenos Aires to renew their fraudulently obtained passports when the war broke out, but they soon returned to Slovenia attempting to penetrate ACER.
But as relations with Russia deteriorated, Slovenia’s own spy agency received a tip about the “normal” and “quiet” couple living in the pleasant Črnuče suburb of its capital.
Wiretaps and text messages revealed suspicious meetings across Europe and the Slovenians called in allied intelligence agencies to piece together the couple’s story.
“We worked together in the utmost secrecy,” Volk told the WSJ. “It was a puzzle.”
They discovered that the couple’s companies were kept afloat with cash from their bosses in Moscow, while investigators in Argentina discovered that the only two witnesses to their wedding had given false identities.
Immigration officials in Buenos Aires then examined the couple’s fingerprints in the Interpol database and discovered they were those of Artem Dultsev and Anna Dultseva.
His sudden arrest in December 2022 prompted a return to Moscow of spies who feared discovery.
A woman in Rio de Janeiro and a man in Athens were stunned to discover that their partners were married Russian spies, one of whom had created her cover by stealing the identity of a Greek baby who died in 1991.
Campos Wittich’s veterinarian girlfriend helped mobilize the campaign to find him when he disappeared during a holiday in Malaysia, only to discover that he was already married to fellow Russian spy Irina Romanova, who disappeared from Athens at the same time.
Arrested in December 2022, they have since been held in a Slovenian prison awaiting trial, while their son and daughter, aged eight and 11, have been placed with foster carers.
‘They have taken it stoically. It is obvious that they are professionals. But they’re not talking,” a source said.
Moscow has increasingly relied on unknown agents for its intelligence gathering since the expulsion of more than 700 diplomats over its war in Ukraine.
“Illegals are becoming increasingly important to Moscow, especially as the line between espionage and war is becoming almost non-existent,” Russian security expert Andrei Soldatov told the WSJ.
Many have targeted the United States, including the 10 discovered by the FBI’s Operation Ghost Stories in 2010.
Suspected Russian spy Campos Wittich fled to Moscow following arrests in Slovenia, leaving a distraught girlfriend in Rio de Janeiro.
Wittich is married to fellow Russian spy Irina Romanova, who also left an unsuspecting partner when she fled Greece.
They bought houses, took jobs and started families in an attempt to calm suspicious neighbors.
One went to Harvard, two to Seton Hall University, and one became an in-house IT head for a well-connected consulting firm in DC.
The revelations inspired the 2013 drama series The Americans, based on married KGB agents who spy for the Soviet Union after moving to a D.C. suburb.
The pair face a maximum of eight years in prison for espionage under Slovenian law and there is speculation they could be exchanged for Western prisoners held in Russian jails.
“We know they were important, serious officers,” Volk said.
“It’s like ‘The Americans,’ except in Slovenia.”