The global hunt for Putin’s ‘sleeper agents’
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. MI6 had a secret so sensitive that Slovenia’s spy chief needed to fly to London to hear it in person. Somewhere in his tiny Alpine nation, a pair of elite Russian spies were hiding under deep cover.
But the British intelligence agency couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell him their names. The CIA had heard about them just days earlier. Josko Kadivnik, director of Slovenia’s intelligence service Sova, meaning Owl, felt his stomach sink.
In its three decades of independence, Slovenia had never arrested such a spy. Now, just weeks after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, he was being tasked with a mission that went far beyond Slovenia’s borders to the heart of a New Cold War: His small team of officers needed to capture two Russian sleeper agents. The stakes of this mission lay in Russia, where jail cells were filling up with political prisoners and a growing list of Americans seized as hostages in a geopolitical game of arresting and trading people like pawns.
For every Russian spy the U.S. and its allies could capture, one of the Kremlin’s prisoners could be exchanged into freedom. Working out of the Central Intelligence Agency’s headquarters, analysts in the mission center known as “Russia House" had been mapping a network of “illegals": spies who spent years delicately weaving themselves into the fabric of Western society.
They included Russian intelligence officers posing as Brazilian researchers in the Arctic and at Johns Hopkins University; and a Spanish news reporter working on Ukraine’s front lines. The Kremlin called these foot soldiers Vladimir Putin’s “invisible front," an army of agents living false lives on foreign passports and second languages. Identifying one, American spy catchers
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