Suspected Russian agents held in Slovenia

Maria Mayer and Ludwig Gisch settled in Slovenia’s capital, Ljubljana, in 2017, with their two young children. People who met the couple liked them; the new arrivals from Latin America were friendly but never overbearing, inquisitive but never pushy.

Maria opened an online art gallery, while Ludwig ran an IT startup. They told friends a nagging fear of street crime at home in Argentina had prompted their move to Europe. Peaceful, mountainous Slovenia offered a refreshing change of pace.

In interviews with about a dozen people who knew one or both of the couple, two words kept cropping up: “ordinary” and “nice”. Neighbours insisted the people living at No 35 were a run-of-themill family, and said the children could often be heard playing in the garden, shrieking in Spanish.

It therefore came as a shock when, early in December, Maria Mayer and Ludwig Gisch were the targets of one of the most secretive and well-coordinated police and intelligence operations in Slovenia’s recent history.

Officers swarmed the house, arresting the couple and taking their children into care. Police also raided an office owned by the couple. Among the finds, according to a source with knowledge of the investigation: an “enormous” amount of cash; so much, in fact, that it took hours to count.

In late January, Slovenian outlets broke news of the arrests, linking the pair to Russian intelligence.

Sources in Ljubljana told the Guardian this week “Maria and Ludwig” were in fact elite Russian spies known as “illegals”. The arrests came after Slovenia received a tipoff from a foreign intelligence service. On Thursday, the foreign minister, Tanja Fajon, corroborated those claims, telling reporters that the arrested couple were Russian citizens, rather than Argentinians.

Unlike “legal” Russian intelligence officers, who are disguised as diplomats at Moscow’s embassies across the world, illegals operate with no visible links to Russia. They are trained to impersonate foreigners, then sent abroad to gather intelligence. Many have children, who are raised in the cover identity without any idea their parents are really Russian.

“The suspects are members of a foreign intelligence service, who used illegally obtained foreign identity documents to live and work in Slovenia under false identities and secretly gather information,” said Drago Menegalija, a police spokesperson.

Two sources with detailed knowledge of the case said Maria and Ludwig worked for Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service. If they are indeed SVR illegals, it will be the first such case aired publicly since 2010, when the FBI rounded up 10 in the US after tipoffs from a mole inside Russian intelligence.

One source with knowledge of behind-the-scenes manoeuvres said that in informal conversations, Moscow had quickly accepted the couple were intelligence officers and backdoor negotiations are under way with western countries to exchange them for a person or people currently in jail in Russia.

Slovenia, with a weaker counterintelligence environment than many European countries yet inside the Schengen free movement zone, was a perfect base for the couple to be able to travel through Europe without border checks. “The majority of their activity was not in Slovenia,” said one source.

Since the invasion of Ukraine, western countries have expelled hundreds of “legal” spies, working from embassies across Europe under diplomatic cover. This may have forced Moscow to rely on illegals more. The stash of cash found could indicate that the pair’s duties involved paying Russian informal agents or informants. Moscow sometimes uses illegals for this kind of task, because intelligence officers working out of embassies could be subject to routine surveillance.

Maria’s social media pages show she travelled frequently to promote 5’14 gallery, her online art portal. It is not clear whether she was targeting artistic circles, or merely using the cover job as an excuse to travel and carry out other work. She travelled to Britain on several occasions, where she put on a display of work at a gallery inside an Edinburgh shopping centre.

Her husband, Ludwig Gisch, used an Argentinian passport that claimed he was born in Namibia in 1984, according to a copy obtained by the Guardian. He ran DSM&IT, a firm offering software to organise people’s email inboxes, blocking viruses, malware and spam.

The company’s Twitter profile has only three followers, one of which is Gisch and another the account of his wife’s gallery. A friend of the couple who downloaded the trial version of the software said he doubted anyone would pay for such a service.

Gisch used his job to travel. His social media profiles suggest he attended CloudFest 2022, a conference in Baden-Württemberg, Germany that says it attracts thousands of senior executives working on online security. It would have provided remarkable networking opportunities.

Elena Vavilova, a former SVR illegal, said in a 2019 interview that the ideal illegal was someone who is average looking, does not attract attention and does not crave external approval. The couple in Slovenia appear to have fitted this mould perfectly. “She was a grey mouse,” said one Slovenian artist who met Maria and her children on several occasions. “I don’t believe she could have been a spy.”

At their former home in Črnuče, a quiet suburb of Ljubljana, a Christmas wreath was still hanging on the front door, even as the magnolia tree in the garden was ready to bloom. A neighbour said she often saw the two children playing in the garden, and recalled that the couple often had visitors.

“I speak Spanish well and I could tell she didn’t have an accent in Spanish. They were ordinary nice people, there is no way they were spies. I think it’s all invented by the media,” said the neighbour.

Shortly after the arrests in Ljubljana, a Greek woman and Brazilian man swiftly departed Athens and Rio de Janeiro respectively. Greek authorities believe the pair were also SVR illegals, according to Greek media reports, and may have fled in fear that the couple arrested in Slovenia could blow their cover.

The breadth of Moscow’s spying operations make it a unique threat, said Janez Stušek, who was the director of Slovenia’s Sova intelligence agency. “I believe that the Chinese are mostly interested in economic issues, but for the Russians it’s also political, about the EU and Nato,” he said. Counterintelligence efforts to look for illegals had intensified recently, said Stušek: “Illegals were always on the agenda, but of course after the invasion the level of attention on this topic has gone up.”

On Thursday, Slovenia’s foreign minister, Fajon, said the authorities had prolonged the initial detention period of the pair , and that she was summoning Russia’s ambassador to Slovenia to discuss the case.

In custody, the pair have said little. “They have taken it stoically. It’s obvious they are pros. But they are not talking,” said one source, adding that talks on an exchange were taking place at a high level.

“Now we will see how important these people really are to Russia. This is big game now; it’s clear that Slovenia is just a proxy here.”