LJUBLJANA, Slovenia — Darja Stefancic, a Slovenian painter known for her Technicolor landscapes, thought it was odd that an obscure online art gallery run by a woman from Argentina contacted her out of the blue and asked her to join its meager roster of artists.
The painter suspected it was a scam and was worried that the gallery, which virtually no one in Slovenia’s small, close-knit art scene had heard of, “just wanted to trick people.”
And so it was, but in ways that far exceeded even his darkest suspicions.
The online gallery was a front for Russian intelligence, part of an elaborate network of undercover spies trained by Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, the SVRto impersonateArgentines, Brazilians and other foreign citizens throughout Europe.
They were real-life versions of the fictional stars of “The Americans”, a television series inspired by the 2010 arrest of a network of Russian undercover agents in the United States.
An exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana, curated by Tevz Logar, who said the poor quality of the works on display by Ms. Dultseva should have prompted greater scrutiny in the country’s art community. Photo Manca Juvan for The New York Times
Russia, and before it the Soviet Unionhas a long history of massive investment in so-called “illegals,” spies who infiltrate deep into target countries for many years.
Unlike “legal” spies operating under diplomatic cover in Russian embassies, They do not have procedural immunity no obvious connections to Russia and are extremely difficult to detect.
Vladimir PutinRussia’s president and a former KGB officer, “has invested enormous resources in this rather eccentric priority,” said Calder Walton, research director of the Intelligence Project at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
“Have a true fetish by illegals dating back to his time in the KGB.”
The owner of an art gallery in Slovenia, whose real name is Anna Dultseva, did such a good job imitating an artistic Argentinean named Maria Rosa Mayer Munos that, according to the Kremlin, even their two sons were unaware the family had ties to Russia until they flew to Moscow on Thursday as part of a sweeping East-West prisoner exchange.
Putin greeted the children — a 12-year-old girl and a 9-year-old boy — in Spanish, the language the family spoke in Slovenia along with English to disguise their Russian connections.
Damian Kosec, founder and director of SLOART Gallery and Auction House, at his gallery in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Photo by Manca Juvan for The New York Times
“Good evening,” Putin can be heard saying in a video of the welcoming ceremony at a Moscow airport released by state television.
He also greeted them Sergey Naryshkinthe head of the SVR intelligence agency.
Arrest
Both Dultseva and her husband were arrested in December 2022 when Slovenian authorities, who had been monitoring the couple for months after a tip from a foreign intelligence serviceraided the family’s comfortable home in Crnuce, a suburb of Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia.
A person briefed on the case said the raid had been timed to catch the couple red-handed while They communicated with Moscow using special equipment that bypassed telephone and Internet lines.
The notice, this person said, had come from Britain, which the couple frequently visited under the pretext of business.
Dultseva organised two art exhibitions in the Scottish city of Edinburgh and visited Britain several times as Mayer Munos.
What Dultseva and her husband, Artem Dultsev, who posed as an Argentine named Ludwig Gisch in Slovenia and ran their own fake business, a high-tech startup, they managed as spies before their arrest in 2022 is still being evaluated.
Neighbours in Crnuce, the district of Ljubljana where they lived, say the family kept to themselves, had a small dog and rarely received visitors.
The children, who were placed in foster homes After the parents’ arrest, they attended the nearby British International Schoolwhose fees (more than $10,000 a year per student) far exceeded what the couple could afford according to the financial reports they filed for their companies.
Dultseva’s art gallery, called 5’14, reported a loss of 10,827 euros (almost 12,000 dollars) in 2019, a profit of 483 euros in 2020 and a profit of 3,032 euros in 2021, the last year for which it submitted its annual results to the authorities.
The modest results and the low quality of works of art from the gallery, said Tevz Logar, a prominent Slovenian curator, should have aroused suspicion.
But art in Slovenia “is a safe space” because “there is no scrutiny or control,” he added.
Most of the works Dultseva offered for sale, she said, “are the kind of art that is entrusted to China“.
Her husband’s company, DSM & IT, reported total profits of only a few thousand euros each year.
Both companies had only one employee.
“They never said hello to anyone and lived completely separate lives,” said Majda Kvas, a 93-year-old woman who lives opposite the former spy house, a three-storey house with a small garden surrounded by a wooden fence.
“I thought they were from Venezuela,” he said.
Neighbors, Kvas said, sometimes gossiped about who the couple were and what they were doing, but mostly ignored them because they never caused any trouble.
Investigation
Vojko Volk, Slovenia’s state secretary responsible for security and intelligence services, said on Friday that investigators were still trying to piece together what exactly the couple were doing before their arrest in 2022, but “I have no doubt that they were very, very, very important.”
The discovery of large sums of cash at home has sparked speculation that they may have been involved in funding Russian operations, including sabotage teams, across Europe.
But Volk played down that possibility.
Marjan Miklavcic, former head of Slovenia’s military intelligence, said Russian undercover agents were often placed without a clear mission and served as a hidden reserve force which could be activated in a moment of crisis.
The fake Argentine couple first moved to Slovenia in 2017 but, he said, probably only became fully active after the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine five years later, when the alleged spies were expelled from several European countries.
In November 2022, the head of the British security service MI5 He said that more than 400 Russian spies had been expelled throughout Europe, which was “the most significant strategic blow against Russian intelligence services in recent European history.”
The disarray in Russia’s spy networks, Miklevcic said, “means that Russia has lost many of its usual sources of information and is likely to activated undercover agents” to try to fill in the gaps.
“But of course they are not James Bonds,” he added, citing the fact that they had been caught and apparently made huge mistakes in their trade.
The gap between how spies are portrayed on film and their often humdrum and sometimes incompetent real lives has been experienced first-hand by Nina Khrushcheva, a Russian-born academic at the New School in New York.
In the early 2000s, she had a student named Richard Murphy, who claimed to be from Philadelphia but, Khrushcheva recalls, “looked like Boris Yeltsin and had a thick Russian accent.”
Murphy, whose real name is Vladimir Guryevwas arrested in 2010 for espionage in New Jersey along with his wife, part of the group that inspired “The Americans,” and then deported to Russia as part of another prisoner exchange.
The arrest, Khrushcheva recalls, came as no surprise, as Murphy “was clearly lying through his teeth.”
Los false argentins In Slovenia, they appear to have been higher-calibre agents.
Dultseva, the owner of the gallery, spoke Spanish largely without accentaccording to Mariken Heijwegen, a Dutch artist who used her as a sales agent.
The artist said she met Dultseva at an art fair in Croatia and sold two of her paintings thanks to the Russian.
“She looked Argentine,” Heijwegen recalled, and was “very sweet and kind.”
The artist said she had no idea the woman she knew as Maria Rosa Mayer Munos had been arrested as a Russian spy until the paintings she had left in Slovenia were suddenly sent back to the Netherlands.
Damian Kosec, a veteran of Slovenia’s art scene and owner of the country’s largest physical and online gallery, said he had never heard of Dultseva’s business until news of her and her husband’s arrest surfaced in the media.
Choosing art as a cover, he added, made sense since “there is so little money in Slovenia that no one in the government pays attention to it.”
He said he had been lobbying officials for years to crack down on shady operators selling counterfeits to no avail.
“Nobody cares. You can do whatever you want in the art business here,” he said.
“These Russians didn’t care about art. They just needed a business to cover their expenses.”
c.2024 The New York Times Company
