The Journal. - Inside the Hunt for Putin’s Sleeper Agents

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

A family of deep-cover Russian spies hiding in the heart of Europe. A Slovenian spycatcher with a daunting mission. After months of reporting, WSJ's Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson unspool the story of the global hunt for Vladimir Putin's sleeper agents, and how it culminated in the biggest game of hostage diplomacy since the Cold War. Further Reading: -The Global Hunt for Putin’s ‘Sleeper Agents’  -Inside the Secret Negotiations to Free Evan Gershkovich  Further Listening: -The Historic U.S.-Russia Prisoner Swap  -Inside Russia’s Spy Unit Targeting Americans  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

August 1, 2024, Moscow. It was dark by the time the flight arrived. In news footage, you see a Kremlin honor guard with ceremonial bayonets. The Russians coming home are part of a prisoner swap. Among them are hackers, an assassin, an arms dealer. Dangerous men with notorious pasts. But there's one group that stands out. They look like a study in a normal family next door. The first lady off the plane. They look like a study in a normal family next door.

Yep. The first lady off the plane is a mom. She has mousy brown hair. She's wearing a blue shirt, open-up-the-collar jeans and plimpsoles. And with her is an 11-year-old girl. That's our colleagues Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw. A daughter has her hair up and wearing Harry Potter sneakers. This mom holding her daughter's hand is trailed by her husband and her son. They walk down the staircase towards this red carpet where the dictator of Russia, Vladimir Putin, is waiting.

And he has a bouquet of flowers. The camera shows Putin hugging the mousy woman. Then he greets the girl and her little brother. It's a little hard to hear Putin over the airplane. And Putin says to the girl, Buenas noches. Why is he addressing this girl in Spanish? This girl, until really a few minutes before, thought her parents were Argentinian citizens.

The truth is they were Russian spies who'd spent a decade more assembling an entirely fictitious life. The children weren't told the truth about why their parents had been arrested, of course. They didn't know that their parents spoke Russian. They didn't know anything about their parents, really. For years, this family lived quietly, first in Argentina, then in the suburbs of Slovenia. The parents gave away nothing about themselves. Nothing. Nothing.

They were like ghosts. In the back of your mind, you're kind of like, who is this couple? What's going on with this? To answer those questions, Joe and Drew and a team of Wall Street Journal reporters worked across four continents. They spoke with more than 30 former and current officials in nine countries. They obtained hundreds of court documents and personal records. The Kremlin never responded to their questions.

After months of reporting, our team untangled the truth about Russia's most famous family of spies and unspooled the story of a global hunt. A hunt that hinged on lucky breaks, old-school sleuthing, and leaps of faith. How did they get caught? That's a long story. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Kate Leinbach. It's Friday, March 28th. Coming up on the show, Inside the Hunt for Putin's Sleeper Agents.

Okay, flights on air Canada. How about Prague? Ooh, Paris. Those gardens. Gardens. Prague? Ooh, Paris. Those gardens. Gardens. Amsterdam. Tulip Festival. I see your festival and raise you a carnival in Venice. Or Bermuda has carnaval. Ooh, colorful.

You want colorful. Thailand. Lantern Festival. Boom. Book it. How did we get to Thailand from Prague? Oh right, Prague. Oh boy. Choose from Prague? Oh, right! Prague! Oh, boy. Choose from a world of destinations, if you can. Air Canada. Nice travels. June 14, 2013. Buenos hair. Yeah. Look at this. June 14, 2013.

Buenos Aires, Argentina. When the patient arrives at the hospital, she's quiet, petite, and clearly in late-stage pregnancy. Medical staff end up running towards her. When she shows up, she's fully dilated. She's ready to give birth within the hour. And the doctor notices there's something a little bit weird. The woman checks in and gives the name Maria Rosa Maier Munoz.

That's Dr. Mario Perez, the obstetrician who saw Maria. He's delivered thousands of babies. I think 10,000 babies. And this one stuck out of his mind just because he thought there was something really unusual and I couldn't put my finger on it at the time. Dr. Perez jotted down some notes. Patient Maria was barely interacting with staff. She didn't seem to ask questions or have many requests.

She delivered the baby quietly, with no anesthesia. He notices at one point that she seems really lonely. There's something about this woman that just doesn't seem spiritually well, the doctor says in his words. The couple names their baby girl Sophie, a natural-born Argentine. Maria and her husband Ludwig speak to each other in hushed voices, cooing with the baby in fluent Spanish. And again, there's something weird.

The doctor notices this couple, they're not FaceTiming or calling anybody. Like normally when someone gives birth, you've got visitors, well-wishers, gifts even, who knows? Especially in Argentina, you'd have lines of relatives of all types coming to say hi. And no one's coming to say hi to this family. A year later, Maria is pregnant again, this time with a son. And during this second delivery, the doctor again notes her composure. This is a woman with a high tolerance for pain.

She somehow manages in that moment of pain and difficulty not to give away anything of her real identity. It is buried so deep. Dr. Perez was witnessing the steely resolve of a master Russian spy. Maria's silence would be an important trait for years to come. For more than a decade, she and her husband kept lives so unassuming and so low-key they

could melt into the shadows of civilian life. The couple was secretly sending intel back to Moscow, working under what the Americans call non-official cover. The Kremlin has another name for it. They're called illegals. That's Dan Hoffman, the CIA's former station chief in Moscow. The illegals really mean something to Putin on a personal level. I would say with a high level of confidence that he would be briefed on the tactics

and the status of these illegals on a fairly regular basis, say once a month, and he would be tracking it. The illegals are intelligence operatives who work without official ties or protection from their government. Dan is one of the top guys who actually hunted down illegals during his time at the CIA. Illegals aren't conventional spies, who might say take a posting as a diplomat at an embassy. When those kinds of spies get caught, they just get sent back on a plane home.

Diplomatic immunity keeps them out of jail. Russia has done things differently. They would send their intelligence officers overseas, principally to the West, the United States in particular, without any diplomatic backstopping. They would be posing as business people or academics, very deep cover. The risk of doing that is you don't have diplomatic immunity, so if you get caught, you're going to jail. But the benefit is that it's super hard to find these people. It's like a needle in a stack of needles. The illegals can yield valuable gains. In a major coup for the Soviet Union in the 1950s, an undercover spy stole America's atomic secrets while living in Brooklyn. Masquerading as an artist, he had a studio facing the U.S. Attorney's Office.

That illegal used a hollow nickel for coded messages meant for the Soviets. And this kind of spy activity would be mythologized in Russian pop culture. They had a very famous TV show in the 1970s, the 17 Moments of Spring, and the hero of this series was a guy named Stirlitz. It was a Russian illegal who had penetrated the Nazi inner circle. It's fictitious, but that's the lore of intelligence for the KGB. And when that TV show was airing in the 1970s, the Soviet citizens would stay home and watch it.

The streets were empty because people were at home watching this TV show. One of the viewers was a young Vladimir Putin. He was enthralled by the undercover super spy Stirlitz. The Soviet Union's answer to James Bond. Putin loved this stuff. He was massively inspired as a young man by watching these shows. That's Drew and Joe again. And inspired enough that, you know, quite soon afterwards, he walked through the Leningrad office of the KGB through the front door. And said, I speak German, send me out there, send me out there. Putin wouldn't become an illegal, but he did manage deep cover agents abroad.

He has said that while he was in Dresden, part of what he did was working as an illegal support officer. What does an illegal support officer do? So that can be anything from passing messages or passing resources to helping to find the documents to create these fake identities for new illegals. They picked up the birth certificates of children who died in their first months of life and used those birth certificates of dead babies and toddlers to pick up passports from Greece or Mexico or anywhere in the world. And they started to live lives as those individuals.

That's exactly how the mousy woman with the quiet composure ended up assuming her new identity. Using doctored records from a dead infant from a small Greek village 30 years earlier, Anna Diltseva, an elite officer in Russia's foreign intelligence service, became Maria Munoz, an Argentinian national. The master spy would eventually reunite with her husband, her subordinate officer, a man born Artem Dolcev. Artem would later take the alias Ludwig. They were really married in Russia in the 2000s, but they got married again in Argentina

to create the paper trail. Yeah. Exactly. And for this wedding, they needed witnesses. So they invited a couple, some of the few friends they seemed to make. A Colombian couple met Maria and Ludwig through their kids. They told the journal about being invited as witnesses to the marriage. The Colombians later reflected that it was odd that they'd never met any of the couple's other relatives or friends.

For years, Maria and Ludwig crafted identities as ordinary Argentines. Maria attended a public relations class, and neighbors saw Ludwig leave the house during office hours, often wearing a tie. They raised two children and only spoke Spanish at home. But by 2017, this phase of their mission was coming to a close. After establishing covers, the sleeper agents were about to become awakened for a broader mission, one that would take them into the heart of Europe. They get a new order from what's called the Center, which is basically Moscow. It's time to go to Slovenia.

Why Slovenia? It's in the middle of Europe's passport-free zone, so you can get in a car and drive all the way to Germany, France, Spain, Italy, wherever you want to go, and nobody's going to stop you and look at your passport. No passport checks. Easy travel. It was a tantalizing way for the Russians to advance their mission, like having a key to a network of invisible pathways across dozens of European countries. The family moved into a modest pastel house on the outskirts of Slovenia's capital, Ljubljana. Did you talk with anybody who knew them? Yeah, we talked to their neighbors, all kinds of their people from their school

community, and I mean Joe and I have been journalists for I don't know maybe 15 years or more at this point and we're pretty used to showing up and doing what we call Vox Pops with the neighbors. Stuff happens, you go, hey, do you know this guy? And in my career, I've rarely met someone who just nobody remembered anything interesting about at all, nothing. In Slovenia, Maria and Ludwig had innocuous day jobs. Maria ran an art gallery.

His story he ran an IT firm. Again, very vague. But when you start digging into the profile, you see there was method in all of these decisions. How so? An art gallery as a front is not only a place where it's easy to explain money coming in that can then move out through the accounts, it's also a place that gives you an easy cover for traveling around Europe to go and see exhibitions on the surface where, of course, you then have the ability to go and see other people without arousing suspicion.

And Maria traveled often. She flew to art fairs in London and Edinburgh. Her jet setting provided cover for meetings with contacts and recruiting future agents. She was also doing some of this crazy, like old school Cold War trade craft of spying. It was incredibly ornate and incredibly what you would think actually of like old fashioned and anachronistic.

But the people that we talked to whose job it is And incredibly what you would think actually of like old fashioned and anachronistic, but the people that we talk to whose job it is to try and track this say that this is the toughest stuff to unveil. Maria would go to a forest in the south of Slovenia. There she would slip messages for her handlers under a designated rock. The US obviously has incredible ability to eavesdrop on our phones and emails and everything else. But leaving a rock in the woods of Slovenia, you know, how are we going to find that? Maria's online gallery claimed to work with 90 artists around the world.

The gallery's social media posted pictures from exhibitions across Europe. Her face is never shown. She is in one picture, standing next to a stepladder and adjusting a painting on the wall. But it's her back to the camera. It turns out the true nature of her work was surveillance. Maria set up her small office just steps away from one of her marks, the director of a European Union energy regulatory agency. Russia wanted to know more about what the regulator was up to, so Maria started watching the director closely. Meanwhile Ludwig had a

startup registered in a nondescript building downtown. On his computer there was hardware to communicate securely with Moscow. The family was private. They marked birthdays without inviting other children. They drove a simple Kia sedan. And they tried to blend in. They never got a parking ticket, let alone any kind of, you know, tax infraction. They always made sure they reported on time. There was nothing flash, nothing to draw attention to themselves. The couple were model citizens, law-abiding, quiet and careful. Until they weren't.

Because over the years, Maria and Ludwig were starting to get bolder. They were starting to take some risks, including a family vacation. Despite all the discipline and the layers of lies, that ultimately was the mistake that gave them away. Nobody's perfect. It's in real life, spies are human beings, and that's what happened here. That's after the break.

The chief of Slovenia's spy agency sits in an office framed by a metallic owl, the emblem for the country's intelligence agency, SOVA. SOVA means owl. The Slovenian director, Josjko Kadivnik, cuts a commanding figure. He wears kind of silver neck chains and Armani scarves, and the joke is that he kind of dresses like the organized crime bosses that he normally investigates. He has a lot of loyalty from his men. He needed that because the assignment he was about to take on, no Slovenian spy chief had ever had to take on anything quite like that before.

The high stakes assignment came suddenly in early spring 2022. Weeks earlier, Russia launched its ground invasion of Ukraine. The intake's assignment came suddenly in early spring 2022. Weeks earlier, Russia launched its ground invasion of Ukraine. Yoshko Kadyvnik gets a call. Would you please come to London? The head of MI6 wants to see you. The Slovenian wondered what secret could be so sensitive that his British counterpart had to deliver it in person.

Kadyvnik flew to London, and what he learned at that meeting made his heart race. The head of MI6 is referred to as C. It's kind of his code name. It dates back to the foundations of the spy agency. And C tells his Slovenian counterpart, you've got some Russian spies in your country. And he passes along a tip, but this tip is incredibly vague.

MI6 either would not or could not tell Kadyvnik names, only that the two Russians were hiding under deep cover as illegals. It's the toughest thing you can do in counterintelligence work. Of all the foreigners in any given country, two of them are actually Russian spies, of all the foreigners in any given country, two of them are actually Russian spies, and you've got to find them. In Kudibnik's world, this was as urgent and as complicated as it gets. British and American intelligence were now counting on his tiny team to find the illegals and arrest them. So he gets this monumental, impossible task. What does he do?

Because the secret is so potentially explosive, he can tell very few people. So to begin with, he only shares this with the prime minister and the national security advisor. And they have to formulate a team and a task force who themselves aren't even briefed on the full scope of what they're looking for. But they know they're looking for someone. So they have to start rifling through all of the data and the information and the travel records, you name it, of people that they think could be potentially suspicious.

What Kudivnik couldn't have known then was that his targets were operating right under his nose, less than three miles from his office. The Dolcevs had been careful. Neighbors saw a quiet Argentinian family, nothing much to see. But their cover began to unravel when the family went on vacation. Argentina bedraggled, ragged, desperate, and with real, real work to do. They did take a trip to Russia in 2018 to see Argentina play the World Cup. For the Dolcevs, it would be the perfect cover. Russia was hosting the World Cup. The family could blend in with a crush of other tourists.

They were, after all, just a family of Argentinian football fans. And as fate would have it, the match was being played in Maria's real hometown. Could you believe it? She could go and watch Argentina, wearing an Argentine shirt, and then be in the same hometown where she'd grown up. That was a trip for the mom to let the family meet their kids, you know, the grandparents, without the kids ever kind of picking up on what was really going on.

But the spies made a bad miscalculation. And now Argentina are staring at major, major problems. As they were getting their travel documents in order, they opted to travel on Russian diplomatic passports. The couple flew under their real names, not as Maria and Ludwig, but as Anna and Artem Dolcev. Why would they do that?

They'd been so careful. Why would they fly on Russian diplomatic passports? Obviously, with a Russian diplomatic passport, they wouldn't have needed a visa. They wouldn't have needed to, you know, potentially alert that they were applying for a visa. They could have just gone in. And so that could be one reason. Maybe they didn't want to leave any record on their Argentine passports that they'd been to Russia. Yeah. Because that would have been kind of alerting behavior like, oh, interesting. Maybe the trip came together at the last minute. They didn't have enough time to apply for

a visa. That's one of the unknowables here. Investigators at OWL and its partner agencies poured through reams of government documents. And eventually, this travel record came to their attention. A pair of Russians traveling on diplomatic passports, traveling with two children of Argentinian nationality flew to Moscow. That's all it was, but just seemed slightly odd. When they start asking if there's any record, either in Slovenia or elsewhere, of these particular Russian diplomats

serving at embassies anywhere across Europe, they get nothing back. It's even more of a mystery. Investigators examine the husband's Russian passport details. They ask themselves, what connections might this guy have in Russia? They find nothing under the couple's names online. But they have one clue. It's in his name. In Russia, a son will have his father's name as his middle name. Using this logic, the investigators try to guess the names of his family members.

Maybe they could find his father. When they started to look for the father's name with the same surname, on social media, rifling through this huge kind of haystack of information, looking through Russian sources, they found an image of an individual's house who matched that name. And when they zoomed in on the photo, against the wall was a picture of two newlyweds. And when the investigators looked closer at this photo inside a Russian house, they recognized the happy couple.

The newlyweds in that picture matched the faces of two Argentinian parents living in the suburbs of the capital of Slovenia. So then the question becomes, if these two are Argentinians living in the suburbs, why is their picture, their wedding day picture, on a wall in central Russia? Huh. Okay, so now Kudibnik has these suspects.

What does he do next? Surveil them, track them, build the case against them, all without giving them any hint that they were being watched. Owl investigators hack into the Dolcev's phones and intercept their mail. And you have to imagine how nerve wracking this is. These two are expert spies.

They pour over their bank accounts and examine the couple's declared income. Things aren't adding up. Like how could this couple afford the tuition for their children's private schooling? Owl agents start to tail the family's Kia sedan, often following them from a distance. They have to map their routine,

understand that these really are the people that they're looking for, and then make a plan in concert with their allies, the CIA, MI6, the other European agencies, about when and exactly how they're going to arrest them. December 5, 2022, Ljubljana, Slovenia. A cold fog is rolling in. The Dulcevs are in their house. It's a Monday morning. People undercover in civilian cars all across this side street.

They waited until the family had dropped off the children, had come back. Shortly after nine in the morning, Kadyvnik makes the call. Special forces in masks, sniper rifles, crept up over the fence, lifted the shutters that they put down on the windows. And the raid begins. You have guys bursting through windows. Officers are thundering through the house.

Special forces shouting, get down, get down. Artyom actually fell off his chair and his laptop was still open, communicating securely to Moscow. He doesn't even have time to close out the window while it's still actively running. The Slovenian police team Maria, who falls to the floor and begins crying. She begins to cry. She claims that she's injured. The police aren't sure what to do with her.

They pick her up, tell her that she's under arrest. And then she kind of returns to her feet. And from that moment, according to people who were there at the raid, her demeanor completely changed. And she stands there quietly while the arrest is finished. She then became poker-faced and she said absolutely nothing. It only took minutes.

Police searched the property for hours. Inside was the facade of a domestic life in pieces. Glass and toppled furniture was everywhere, but breakfast was still on the table. Neighbors watched from their windows late into the night. Detectives hauled out electronic devices and bags of money. There was a special compartment in the refrigerator that looked like it had been purpose-built and when the Slovenian police removed it, they found hundreds of thousands of euros in crisp new Hyde nomination notes.

They also found a bunch of technology that they weren't familiar with, what seemed to be kind of jerry-rigged, USB sticks, flash drives that seemed to have another facility to them. And a lot of this stuff was so high tech and unfamiliar to the Slovenians that they ended up sending it over to the U.S. to try and figure out what this stuff was. The Dolcevs were unmasked.

Kadyvnik sent word to the CIA that the operation was a success. In Russia, their arrests sent shockwaves through the Kremlin. Moscow immediately recalled sleeper operatives in Greece and Brazil. And soon, the dulcevs would become bargaining chips in a geopolitical game. March 2023. Belgrade, Serbia, three months after the raid. Yoshko Kadyvnik slips into a government building.

He sits with the Kremlin's top negotiator for prisoner swaps, who has a message, direct from Putin himself. Why are you doing America's bidding? Don't get involved in this. You don't want to get involved in this. And his message is really point blank. Let's make a trade.

You need to give our people back. Give us our spies back. By the end of the month, the world learns of another arrest, this time in Russia, one that ends up becoming much more personal to Joe and Drew. And now to our other breaking story. Overnight we've learned that an American journalist with the Wall Street Journal has now been arrested in Russia on spying charges. A Russian foreign ministry spokesperson said

they believe Evan Gershkovich was conducting activities not related to journalism. The Wall Street Journal denies the allegations against him and is demanding his immediate release. If convicted, he could face up to 20 years inside a Russian prison. This couple in Slovenia were mentioned to us at one point as people we should watch. The Russians were meeting with the Americans, saying, you know, basically saying, hey, we'd like to trade, let's do a trade for these two.

They could potentially be involved in a trade. And Evan's name was obviously in the mix for that. Delicate negotiations between Washington and Moscow for a complex prisoner swap went on for the rest of 2023 and into the next year. By the summer of 2024, a deal was coming together. It would be the biggest prisoner swap with Russia since the Cold War. And it was all set to take place on August 1st. As Russian state TV captured the homecoming of the Dolcevs, the children had one question for their parents, according to the Kremlin.

Who was the man with flowers who greeted them in Spanish on the tarmac? They'd never heard of Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, another VIP jet was also being received. This one carrying freed Americans. Among the prisoners released by Russia were former Marine Paul Whelan, American journalist Alsuk Hirmasheva, and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.

Joe and Drew raced to Andrew's Air Force base near Washington, DC to greet their friend and colleague. There's no red carpet and out of the plane comes two journalists and a former Marine and a rock war veteran. That's it. And the contrast, that's really striking. You can see Russia's celebrating its spies and its assassins and America's just sort of quietly receiving its two journalists and a veteran. Evan Gershkovich was held in Russia for more than 16 months. Anna and Artem Dolcev were detained for about 20 months on charges of spying and falsifying documents.

All told, Russia freed 16 people in the swap. The West released eight. This prisoner swap was a kind of window into a really messy, complicated world and the secret world underneath it, where these countries are all jockeying and vying for influence. It was a story that is deeper and richer than I think anybody first understood when they

looked at it. And knowing what you know now, do you think we will see more prisoner swaps like this one that we saw on August 1st? There will be more August 1sts. There may not be as big, may not be as many countries, but this is by now just an established pattern of the way the world works. Every six months, a couple times a year, one country releases an ordinary American charged with trumped up or spurious charges

and exchanges them for somebody else, a money launderer, a sanctions buster, a spy. It's just part of what goes on now. — As for the daltsevs, they're now living openly as Russians. After years of laying low, they've become celebrities, the toast of Russia's intelligence community. — They're like folk heroes now. They're doing interviews, they're on TV. They are state media's idea of a patriotic Russian family.

Yeah, they really have become kind of poster children for what Putin defines as this new Russian patriotism and for the primacy of the secret services inside that system. They talked about the sacrifices that they made. They talked about it's almost like a recruitment campaign. I started crying and Sophie started talking. In a TV special, the children, Sophie and Daniel, are shown playing near a statue of Stirlitz, Putin's boyhood hero, the fictional super-spy. The brother and sister are slowly learning a new language, the one their parents grew up with.

My big family. My baby. the one their parents grew up with. Near the end of the interview, Anna says her daughter is already musing about her new identity and her future. — Anna says her daughter would like to be a spy, to devote her life to serving Russia, just like her mother. That's all for today, Friday, March 28th. This episode was produced by Matt Kwong and edited by Colin McNulty. Additional reporting by Juan Ferraro and Sylvina Fridlewski. Special thanks to Kate Vittori Gina. The theme remix in today's episode is by Nathan Singapok.

The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. The show is made by Katherine Brewer, Pia Gadkari, Rachel Humphreys, Sophie Coddner, Ryan Knutson, Matt Kwong, Jessica Mendoza, Colin McNulty, Annie Minoff, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alessandra Rizzo, Alan Rodriguez-Espinosa, Heather Rogers, Pierce Singie, Jeevika Verma, Lisa Wang, Katherine Whalen, Tatiana Zimis, and me, Kate Limbaugh. With help from Trina

Menino. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapok, and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by So Wiley. Additional music this week by Katherine Anderson, Marcus Bagala, Peter Leonard, Billy Libby, Bobby Lord, Emma Munger, Nathan Singapok, Griffin Tanner, and Blue Dot Sessions. Fact-checking this week by Mary Mathis. Fact-checking this week by Mary Mathis. Thanks for listening. See you Monday.