The Kids who didn’t know their parents were Russian spies

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. “Ludwig" and “Maria" had suffered an abrupt end to their clandestine careers, arrested just after finishing breakfast in their suburban home and outed as deep-cover spies for Moscow. But as they flew in a Bombardier jet to freedom as part of an epic prisoner swap last month, they had more familial concerns in mind: How to break it to the kids? Please, they’d quietly pleaded with their Slovenian escorts, don’t address us by our real names.

They hadn’t yet told their son and daughter, touring the cockpit, that they were Russian. The two officers from Directorate S, the so-called “illegals department" of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence agency, had spent more than a decade building fake identities. Their children, 9-year-old Daniel and 11-year-old Sophie, knew their mom and dad as Argentine citizens named Ludwig Gisch and Maria Mayer Muños.

What they didn’t know is that their family was a carefully constructed lie. The couple’s real names are Artem and Anna Dultsev. After a marriage likely arranged by Directorate S, they had been sent to Argentina, where Daniel and Sophie were born.

When Moscow moved the couple from Buenos Aires to a sleepy suburb in the capital of Slovenia, the children enrolled in an international school, completing the facade of a normal middle-class family. Even after they were caught and jailed for espionage, the couple still hadn’t told their children that Spanish—the family’s language—was a second tongue, learned to fluency for a secret assignment meant to last until the siblings came of age and could hopefully be recruited to follow in their footsteps. As Sophie and Daniel returned from the cockpit, they chatted with the bespectacled man who had overseen their