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
Chapter 1: What is the focus of this podcast episode?
August 1st, 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.
Yeah. The first lady off the plane is a mom.
Yeah. She has mousy brown hair. She's wearing a blue shirt, open at the collar, jeans and plimsolls. 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, 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.
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Chapter 2: Who are the sleeper agents described in the story?
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 Doltseva, an elite officer in Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, became Maria Munoz, an Argentinian national.
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Chapter 3: How did the Russian spy family maintain their cover?
Among the prisoners released by Russia were former Marine Paul Whelan, American journalist Alsu Kermesheva, and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. Joe and Drew raced to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C., 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. And that's it. And the contrast, it's really striking. You can see Russia 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 Doltsev 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. They 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 Doltsevs, 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.
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