Finalist: Staff of The Wall Street Journal

The effort to bring home The Wall Street Journal reporter and others unfolded on three continents, involving spy agencies, billionaires, political power players and his fiercest advocate—his mother

By Joe Parkinson, Drew Hinshaw, Bojan Pancevski and Aruna Viswanatha

Evan Gershkovich’s mother, Ella, arrived for an urgent 10:30 a.m. meeting at the White House with President Biden on Thursday, the 491st day of her son’s detention. She had been told to bring her husband Mikhail and her daughter Danielle in a three-minute call that ended with a strict instruction: Tell no one.

Five thousand miles away, Evan Gershkovich was in his final hours in Russia’s custody, aboard a Tupolev-204 government jet bound for a Turkish airport where orange-vested security personnel were waiting nervously. The Wall Street Journal reporter, 32 years old, had been documenting Russia’s descent into repression when agents grabbed him from a steakhouse and turned him into the story he’d been trying to cover. Now he was set to be a central component in one of the most complicated prisoner swaps in history.

Across Europe, planes were ferrying the other human pieces of a fragile puzzle: among them, two other Americans and eight Russians who had together served decades in political prisons and penal colonies. They ranged from hardened dissidents who had braved poisoning and hunger strikes to ordinary Americans who found themselves reduced to bargaining chips in a yearslong geopolitical tug of war with Vladimir Putin.

The price for their freedom was being flown in handcuffs and a bulletproof helmet from Germany on a Gulfstream jet, landing near the Turkish VIP terminal where Russia would collect him. Vadim Krasikov was a professional hit man who had gunned down an exile in broad daylight in a Berlin park. He was the man the Russian president wanted to bring home.

“The Russian Federation will not leave me to rot in jail,” the murderer once told a guard.

For 16 months, Ella Milman had studied the assassin’s case, daunted that such a man could be the key to unlocking her son’s freedom. She was one of an extraordinary cast of characters who worked in the shadows to advance the swap. Her son’s fate rested not just on messages ferried by diplomats and spies, but years of secret interventions drawn from the ranks of prime-time TV hosts, Silicon Valley billionaires and Russian oligarchs. An unlikely duo of Tucker Carlson and Hillary Clinton had each played walk-on roles to propel talks forward.

At the center of the struggle were the U.S. and Germany, two allies grappling with the moral and strategic calculus of freeing guilty prisoners to bring their innocent citizens home. If the U.S. once claimed a “no concessions” policy, that principle has been steadily eroded by one precedent after the next. To respond to Putin and other hostage-taking autocrats, the State Department staffed an entire office of roughly two dozen personnel, led by a former Green Beret who jetted around Europe and the Middle East to explore prisoner trades that might free Gershkovich and others.

Somehow along the way, a mother living in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia found herself stuck between the two most powerful governments in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance, ferrying messages that she hoped could free her son.

While Gershkovich was just released on Thursday morning, the Journal has been reporting on his fate from the moment he was seized. This account is based on more than a year of interviews with dozens of U.S., Russian, European and Middle Eastern national security officials, diplomats, spies, and prisoners’ families. Reporters reviewed classified Russian legal documents, security camera footage from arrests and unpublished photos of previous prisoner swaps to identify key players in the drama. A Journal reporter was on-site in Ankara to watch as Gershkovich stepped out into freedom.

Journal reporters were also, unavoidably, part of the story, followed through the streets of Vienna and Washington and, in one case, summoned for questioning by Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB. Reporters crisscrossed Western capitals, sitting with intelligence officials who insisted that no electronic devices be brought into the meetings and in some cases, communicating through handwritten notes to avoid leaving a data trail.

The newspaper had, in fact, been investigating the story of Russia’s hostage-taking spree since early 2023, when its Russia correspondent Evan Gershkovich encouraged his colleagues to investigate Putin’s brazen strategy of seizing Americans on spurious charges and trading them as hostages. “It’s totally undercovered,” he said then.

‘HAVE YOU BEEN IN TOUCH WITH EVAN?’

Evan Gershkovich’s phone had stopped pinging.

His colleagues hadn’t heard from him since the morning, when he arrived in Yekaterinburg, east of the Urals. It was March 29, 2023, and he was there to interview a source about Russia’s astonishing pace in refurbishing tanks bound for Ukraine. They planned to meet at the Bukowski Grill, off Lenin Avenue, by 4 p.m.

Russia’s defense production was a topic pro-government newscasters had reported openly, with pride, as their country defied foreign sanctions to rev up a war economy. But in Putin’s 23rd year in charge, new threats to the international press were emerging.

Weeks earlier, a reporter friend of Gershkovich from another news organization had sat statue-still in a Moscow flat, the lights out, waiting for a police team banging on the door to leave. A few hours later, a lawyer helped the reporter slip out of Russia. It was, in hindsight, a warning shot.

“Hey buddy, good luck today,” a colleague had messaged Gershkovich the morning he arrived in Yekaterinburg.

“Thanks brotha,” replied Gershkovich. “I’ll let you know how it goes.”

The American son of Soviet Jewish exiles, the reporter was flourishing in the land his parents had fled. A cook for a catering company inspired by Anthony Bourdain to chase the life of a roving correspondent, he arrived in 2017 to a Russian capital still open to inquisitive foreigners. The New Jersey native known to his Russian friends as “Vanya” sought out its dive bars and pop-up restaurants, soaking up stories and jumping at any chance to explore Russia’s 6.6 million square miles.

He had camped with firefighters for four days near a raging Siberian wildfire—long after other reporters had jetted back to Moscow—telling friends, “I just want to get the story right.” At night, he practiced typing then recrafting the first paragraph, or lede, of news stories, a routine he referred to as “doing reps.” He wore baggy faded bluejeans to news conferences and charmed suited ministers who weren’t accustomed to being addressed in the informal, colloquial Russian Gershkovich had spoken since childhood.

But as the war in Ukraine unfolded, officials turned hostile, friends fled, and sources he had known were being jailed. Unidentified men had followed him through the streets as he churned out front-page scoops that challenged the Kremlin’s official narrative of the Ukraine invasion. Still, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs kept renewing his press cards and three-month visas with no complaint. The trip to Yekaterinburg, his second in a month, was meant to be short.

That evening, his phone was still off.

“Have you been in touch with Evan?” a Journal reporter texted a security manager at 10:12 p.m. Yekaterinburg time, 1:12 p.m. in Washington.

From London, New York and Warsaw, Journal staff logged on to video calls and dialed up contacts in Yekaterinburg and Moscow. Another notified the paper’s publisher, Almar Latour, who was touring Robben Island, the Alcatraz-style jail off Cape Town where Nelson Mandela served 18 years in prison. One reporter managed to reach Gershkovich’s driver, who stopped by the apartment he had booked, but found only dark windows: “Let’s hope for the best,” he said. Another repeatedly called a local journalist Gershkovich had hired to help arrange some interviews, who now appeared to be drunk and mumbling.

As midnight passed in Moscow, the Journal called government contacts in Washington, sending notes to the State Department and the White House. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken called back, he pledged, “We will get him back.”

Meanwhile, the paper had to inform his mother, Ella. At 6:16 p.m. at her home in Philadelphia, she got a text from Managing Editor Liz Harris asking her to call. Her son, Harris said, was missing.

Ella was in shock: “What do I do?” she asked.

Soon, her instincts took hold. A skeptical and intuitive mother of two raised in Soviet Leningrad—now St. Petersburg—Ella began scrolling through Russian and American news sources for clues on what had happened to him. He had been charged with espionage, she read, as the news broke around 3 a.m. She learned her son had last been seen at a restaurant 900 miles east of Moscow.

Thumbing out a message to the managing editor, she asked: “Can you give the name of the restaurant please.”

INSIDE THE OPERATION TO SEIZE GERSHKOVICH

Over an encrypted video link, Vladimir Putin was also taking a call.

The mustachioed head of the First Service of Russia’s FSB security agency, Gen. Vladislav Menschikov, was briefing the president on Gershkovich’s arrest, down to the minor details.

Menschikov had once been in charge of Putin’s nuclear bunkers, but now ran the sprawling FSB division that included the Department for Counter Intelligence Operations, or DKRO, a secretive unit that surveilled Americans and had led the operation to seize Gershkovich. Its officers would send up intel on exactly which stories foreign reporters were pursuing, compiled into memos for Putin marked “Personal, Secret,” that described unflattering articles as “anti-Russian actions” orchestrated by Washington. Days earlier, Menschikov had given Putin a briefing on the plan to arrest Gershkovich. Now the president wanted to know how his security services had performed.

The Russian president was raising the stakes in a geopolitical poker game he believed the Americans started. In 2008, in a Bangkok hotel suite, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration sent informants posing as Colombian terrorists to buy surface-to-air missiles from Viktor Bout, an arms trafficker with alleged links to Russia’s security services immortalized in the Nicolas Cage film “Lord of War.” The informants explained the missiles would be useful for shooting down U.S. helicopters. When he agreed to the sale, agents burst in to arrest him. In 2010, the DEA conducted another sting to arrest a former Russian air force pilot, Konstantin Yaroshenko, this time using informants in Liberia who were working with him to smuggle cocaine.

To the DEA, these were successful arrests of dangerous criminals in keeping with the new post-9/11 imperative to snuff out transnational threats. Putin felt Bout and Yaroshenko had been entrapped by a superpower without jurisdiction to arrest Russians in faraway Asia or Africa. Russian diplomats called for their release but were rebuffed by the administrations of both Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

Putin, a former KGB officer and FSB director himself steeped in the dark arts of entrapment, revealed his response in 2018. The FSB arrested Paul Whelan, a former Marine visiting Moscow for a friend’s wedding, and charged him with espionage, which the Michigan native and his government both denied. If America wanted Whelan home, it should free Bout, Putin’s foreign-policy adviser told a U.S. ambassador days later. When the Trump administration balked, Russian police struck again eight months later, arresting another former Marine, Trevor Reed, on assault charges that both he and the U.S. government denied. Reed had once served on Vice President Biden’s Camp David protective guard.

When Biden became president, Putin met him by the fireplace of a lakeside Geneva mansion and proposed the two sides’ intelligence services create a channel to explore prisoner trades—a throwback to the Cold War, and a way to circumvent the State Department diplomats Russians found preachy. Biden, eager to free Americans and ease tensions with Russia, agreed. Even as Putin invaded Ukraine just months later, negotiations in that channel led to the trading of Reed for Yaroshenko, and later Bout for Brittney Griner, a WNBA star caught at Moscow airport in early 2022 with vape cartridges containing less than a gram of medically prescribed hash oil, illegal in Russia. 

Grabbing Americans, Putin had proved, freed Russians. And there was another prisoner Putin wanted, a 58-year-old serving a life sentence in Germany.

Vadim Krasikov’s crime was murder.

Since 2021, Putin had been pushing his national security council officials on secure video calls to bring back the aging veteran of the Soviet-Afghan war. The two of them had been so close that they visited a gun range together. Putin “shoots well,” Krasikov had told his family.

The president seemed so loyal to the twice-married father of three that Western intelligence officials speculated that he had been Putin’s personal bodyguard; close Russia analysts suspected their ties dated back to the president’s time as deputy mayor of mafia-plagued St. Petersburg. Dressed in designer clothes, Krasikov earned $10,000 monthly, plus bonuses for what he told his family were business trips. His wife, housed in an upscale Moscow flat, complained to family members that he bought Porsches and BMWs so frequently that she never had time to get accustomed to driving them. He washed his hands compulsively and manicured his nails.

In 2019, Krasikov had slipped into Berlin using a Russian passport for “Vadim Sokolov.” Then, in broad daylight, as dozens of park goers, servers and diners at a nearby restaurant watched, he fatally shot a rebel exile near a playground. Arrested while trying to change out of a wig and flee on an electric scooter, the bald and goateed gunman hardly spoke a word throughout his entire murder trial. He didn’t even tell investigators his name, which remained a secret until a Bulgarian investigative journalist named Christo Grozev helped uncover it.

The killer acted on his own, Putin would later suggest, “due to patriotic sentiments.”

In 2022, Russia had offered to free Whelan, the former Marine, if America would get Germany to give up Krasikov. The White House had notified Berlin of the idea, but neither government was eager to free a professional killer for an ordinary American prisoner. It was, on the surface, an inconceivable demand. But in March, two weeks before Evan’s arrest, FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov told CIA Director William Burns that Putin remained intent on trading Krasikov for Whelan. Days later, Gershkovich himself texted a colleague: “They keep stupidly asking for him,” he wrote. “The Germans obviously won’t go for that.”

And yet Russia’s president was convinced otherwise. A young Putin had served in Dresden with the KGB, when West Germany was still an American satellite. Now at the pinnacle of his power, he had never reconciled himself to the notion that unified Germany, Europe’s powerhouse, couldn’t be swayed by U.S. pressure.

If the Biden administration wouldn’t exchange Krasikov for Whelan, then perhaps they would for the correspondent of a major U.S. newspaper.

SEEKING HELP FROM ‘THE MOST RATIONAL MAN ON THE PLANET’

Ella hadn’t slept for days, receiving so many calls she’d lost her voice, while incessantly googling the case of the first foreign reporter charged with espionage since the Cold War. Her son was now facing up to 20 years in prison. With her husband Mikhail, she was reading everything she could about the cases of former Marine Paul Whelan, still in a jail somewhere east of Moscow, and basketball player Brittney Griner, who had been traded for an arms dealer. She started to log her meetings and the contacts of people who might help her in a green reportorial notebook. In her research, she noticed the name of a convicted murderer in Berlin who seemed to be close to Vladimir Putin. Had Evan been taken to try to bring him back?

Raised in the same Leningrad as Putin, around the same time, Ella was raised by a Jewish mother who had treated Holocaust survivors as a wartime nurse in Poland. Her father, a Soviet army medic, had reached Berlin in 1945. As a girl, she’d noticed her mother never cried, and when her father died young, found a way to game the arcane Soviet housing system to keep the family apartment. Now Ella would have to show the same resolve and ingenuity if she was going to help her son.

In Washington, Gershkovich’s arrest had landed on President Biden’s daily brief while analysts at the CIA headquarters ran an “equities check” to be sure that he wasn’t somehow working for the U.S. government.

It quickly came back negative, and within two weeks Gershkovich was officially listed as “wrongfully detained.” That opened the door for a little-known federal entity to take his case, offering access to a network of government structures meant to quietly resolve kidnapping crises.

A man with the title of special presidential envoy for hostage affairs met Ella at a Philadelphia restaurant, welcoming her to the “tragic community” of families he served. Roger Carstens was a former Green Beret lieutenant colonel who’d appeared in a reality TV show before being appointed by President Trump. He told her of the faraway countries where he had freed hostages, finding ways to trade prisoners, lift sanctions, or drop prosecutions in return. His enthusiasm for retrieving U.S. citizens, even at steep costs, proved so popular among families of missing Americans that they persuaded President Biden to keep him on.

A veteran of six wars, Carstens would remove his glasses when talking to prisoners’ families to wipe away tears before quoting passages from the Bible or ancient Greek texts he thought spoke to the pain of hostage-taking. He liked to say he “only hired optimists.” His admirers—drawn to his ardor for the job—and detractors—who considered him a bit of a showboat—both referred to him by the same nickname: “Captain America.”

Studying Carstens as he pledged to move heaven and earth to retrieve her son, Ella intuited that he held little authority at the highest level and no swift solution. Ella dialed other Americans who’d made it home from Russia. Griner wasn’t available but the basketball player’s agent was. She learned Carstens rarely met the president, and had to work in the margins to advance ideas. Instead, her son’s file, wrapped up with Russian affairs, would be tightly controlled by Jake Sullivan, a more cautious and calculating career policymaker, a contrast in personalities she would have to navigate.

The youngest national security adviser since the Camelot cabinet of John F. Kennedy, Sullivan had quietly become the most powerful holder of the role since Henry Kissinger. A policy prodigy who’d won the Rhodes, Marshall and Truman scholarships, the 47-year-old only somewhat facetiously called himself “the most rational man on the planet.” Hillary Clinton, who read a Bible verse at his wedding, called him a “once-in-a-generation talent.”

Carefully measuring the weight of each word, he could debate the minutiae of Chinese biotechnology subsidies or Iran sanctions, while dissecting Ukraine’s ongoing battle in Bakhmut down to the city block. On his otherwise bare desk, he kept buttons and postcards from the families of Americans held wrongfully overseas, and several mediators working with him to free them came away impressed by how deeply, if dispassionately, he knew each case. Yet they also used the same phrase to describe a frequent hitch in his decision-making: “paralysis by analysis.”

Sullivan regularly carved out time to decode the moral calculus of negotiating with kidnappers and countries that behaved like them—none so complicated as Russia. The puzzle would be to free Gershkovich, honoring the president’s duty toward an unlawfully detained American, without encouraging autocrats to grab some other reporter, somewhere. For now, the White House would send the Kremlin a straightforward message: Gershkovich was not a spy and must be released immediately. 

A NAVALNY STRATEGY TAKES SHAPE

Carstens that month stepped into a Georgetown restaurant, the reservation discreetly booked under another name, to meet an unusual guest proposing an alternative path forward: Christo Grozev, the Bulgarian journalist who had revealed Krasikov’s identity after the Berlin murder. The soft-spoken 55-year-old was one of the world’s leading investigators of Russian clandestine operators. Often, the evidence he plumbed to track their movements was hiding in plain sight, including the photos they clumsily left on social media, or in bulk-purchased smartphone data normally sold to advertisers. This way, he had unmasked so many agents that intelligence services in Vienna, his home of over 20 years, said they couldn’t protect him. Wanted in Russia, but residing in America, he was guarded by Austria’s elite Cobra forces and transported in an armored car whenever he visited Vienna to see his wife and children. Visiting the country of his birth, he wouldn’t even leave the airport.

Pulling out a cocktail napkin, the journalist jotted Carstens a two-column list of Russian prisoners who the U.S. could trade for Gershkovich and Whelan, the incarcerated Marine. But these low-ranking Russian nobodies would be decorative adornments tacked onto the big ticket exchange that Grozev had been championing for a year. The German government would release the hit man Krasikov, in return for one of Grozev’s dearest friends, Russia’s most famous dissident: Alexei Navalny.

Weeks earlier, Grozev had accepted a best documentary Oscar, for “Navalny,” as the celebrity crowd cheered wildly. Navalny’s life was the stuff of Hollywood legend: a protest leader slowly dying in a Siberian prison. Navalny had dared to uncover Putin’s personal wealth, the corruption at the heart of the regime. He’d identified Putin’s secret, $1.2 billion palace on the Black Sea coast, in a riveting YouTube video seen by more than a quarter of all Russian adults. Putin loathed him.

Tall and handsome with bright blue eyes, Navalny was a folk hero in Germany, whose government had helped him leave Russia, saving his life in 2020, after a nerve-agent poisoning left him in a coma. Berlin, Grozev explained, was open to freeing Krasikov in return for this death-defying dissident. The other Russian prisoners on the napkin—of no particular importance—could be bundled with imprisoned Americans into one big deal.

The problem, in Grozev’s telling, was that the U.S. and Germany were both more willing to press ahead with this morally complex trade than the other fully appreciated. He had helped persuade Hillary Clinton to lobby the German government, to articulate the possibility of a deal. But a year had passed since then. Shortly after Gershkovich’s arrest, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt had spoken to President Biden and explained that Germany would be amenable to a possible prisoner exchange for Navalny. There was a pathway, Grozev told Carstens, who would relay the idea to Blinken and Sullivan. But it would be fraught with misgivings in Washington and Berlin at the thought of freeing a professional killer. They would have to devise ways to advance it informally.

Sullivan, the national security adviser, had also reached out to his Berlin counterpart, Jens Plötner, to discuss the Navalny idea, which Plötner warned was a complicated ask. The country’s top diplomat, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, was aghast at the precedent of freeing a career murderer sent by Putin to kill an exile in a country that prided itself on providing safe haven to refugees. Justice, intelligence, and law-enforcement officials shared her revulsion. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s polling numbers were low, inflation was high, and his coalition was weak. But Plötner pledged to take it up to Scholz.

The chancellor discussed it that month with top aides, in the office where he kept a framed congratulatory letter from President Biden. There were no phones, laptops or smartwatches allowed: The Russians had perched a nest of electronic surveillance systems on the roof of their Stalin-era embassy nearby, which looked directly down onto his spartan workplace.

Freeing Krasikov for Navalny would be politically difficult, Scholz said, but possible and for him, personal. Scholz had gone to shake the hand of the dissident in 2020, back when the nerve agent survivor was still learning to speak and walk again yet already vowing to return to Russia to contest Putin. Scholz had become emotional afterward, telling an aide that Navalny was “a man of immense courage.”

Releasing Krasikov, however, would mean overriding the legal opinion drafted by his own government lawyers arguing against a swap. What Berlin needed was political cover—for America, the superpower that protected Germany, to submit an official request. Meanwhile, to preserve their bargaining strength, Russia couldn’t know how open the chancellor was to freeing Putin’s hit man.

That same month, Scholz’s chief of staff, Wolfgang Schmidt, met a group of Journal reporters and editors, at an office about a mile from the murder site, and relayed the message. “It may not be easy for us, but it’s possible,” he said.

HOW TO SURVIVE IN A RUSSIAN PRISON

Gershkovich’s first letter arrived in April, running two pages, in handwritten Russian.

“Mom…I am trying to write. Maybe, finally, I am going to write something good.”

He signed off: “Until we meet soon. Write me.”

The reporter was spending 23 hours a day in solitary confinement in a 9-foot-by-12 foot cell in the infamous jail where Stalin’s henchman once tortured thousands of enemies of the state. Set in a pastel yellow complex off a leafy street on Moscow’s outskirts, Lefortovo was run by the FSB and designed to make its inmates feel entirely alone. Its sterile corridors were unnervingly quiet save for the echo of slamming cell doors and the jangling of guards’ keys.

Barred from seeing U.S. Embassy officials, Gershkovich maintained contact with the outside world from letters that arrived after passing through censors. Friends were writing to keep his spirits up and sending him care packages with some of the things he didn’t have: dried food, coffee and sugar. A journalist who had been detained in Africa wrote with some tips the former cook quickly adopted: never eat rotten food, establish a routine, look after your body, and keep your space immaculately clean.

When not in his cell, Gershkovich was called to the interrogation room of chief investigator Alexei Khizhnyak, the same FSB interrogator who had once questioned the former Marine, Whelan. Khizhnyak faced prisoners across a T-shaped wooden table, in a room watched over by Che Guevara, Soviet security services’ founder Felix Dzerzhinsky and two portraits of Vladimir Putin. Whelan had said during his pretrial investigation that Khizhnyak had threatened to kill him and asked for him to be taken off the case, a request that was denied.

But as their interrogations stretched for hours, Gershkovich learned that Khizhnyak also shared his passion for soccer and literature. The interrogator was a fan of English Premier League club Liverpool, while Gershkovich, a high school state soccer champion, supported rival club Arsenal. Gershkovich was reading “Life and Fate,” the World War II epic by Soviet war correspondent Vasily Grossman, and Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” followed by dozens of other books, which he and Khizhnyak discussed. He was determined to leave prison a better writer than he’d arrived. 

Ella was writing weekly letters to Evan, recounting the history of a family that had survived the Russian Civil War, World War II, Soviet antisemitism—“and now this is our turn,” she wrote. In April of last year she had rushed up to President Biden at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and grabbed his hands before imploring him: “You are the only one who can bring my boy home.”

Appearing on “Good Morning America,” she recalled Evan joking that Russian prison gruel reminded him of the porridge she’d raised him on. She was worried he was reading too many dark and voluminous tomes drawn from Russia’s tragic past, and suggested he swap out the Stalin-era literature for lighter reads.

In June, Ella and her husband Mikhail traveled to Moscow to attend her son’s appeal hearing, ignoring the advice of the FBI that they might also be arrested. The court camera captured a brief conversation: mother standing next to her son in the glass cage, Gershkovich tilting his head in laughter as she admonished him to be more careful in what he was writing in his letters. “He was making fun of me. It is always his way,” she said.

Like his mother, Gershkovich was building a wall to cope with his ordeal, but as she studied him she could also see he was pacing in the cage, biting his lip and full of nervous energy.

To attest to her son’s good character, Ella, who’d grown up hearing haunting stories of the Soviet secret services, agreed to be interrogated. Alone in the waiting room, she could see people were watching her behind a tinted pane of glass. She saw a cat in the corridor, confiscated, she was told, from a woman jailed for supporting Ukraine. She was escorted to the office of her son’s interrogator, Khizhnyak, who was sitting behind a T-shaped table. Ella had pinned a large badge on her green cardigan: “Free Evan.”

Khizhnyak began with pro forma questions:

“Do you have any head injuries? Are you taking medication?”

Over four hours and 15 minutes, he moved onto Gershkovich’s background. The reporter was working for the U.S. government, he said. He was recruited as a spy at university, he added. No he wasn’t, Ella retorted. Was her son a homosexual? Why didn’t she know the name of his girlfriend? It felt, she later said, “totally bizarre.”

At one point, Ella was distracted by a smell she hadn’t detected for about 40 years, the waft of a cabbage soup popular during Soviet times when rationing was still in force. “Is that Shchi?” she asked. It was, Khizhnyak confirmed. That was her son’s lunch.

When Ella emerged from the prison, Mikhail said she’d been so long he was worried she’d been arrested.

Before their flight back to the U.S. from Moscow, the couple was stopped, then asked to turn in their passports. Their Russian visas were being annulled.

An immigration official dismissed them with a wave of the hand: “Go to New York.” 

ELLA MEETS THE GERMAN CHANCELLOR

The campaign to free Gershkovich appeared to be firing on all cylinders. His face looked down from a 10-story digital billboard on Times Square and banners at the stadiums of the New York Mets and Arsenal. In the Senate, leaders from both parties had demanded his release, backed by parliaments in the U.K. and continental Europe. Blinken had shown Ella a list in his jacket pocket, of Americans color-coded black for those still jailed and red for those retrieved.

“Free Evan,” read pins on the blazers of reporters across the U.S. and Europe.

Yet so far, more Americans were vanishing into Russian jails than coming home. In June, Russia took two more U.S. citizens, including another journalist, Alsu Kurmasheva, an editor at Radio Free Europe, later charged with spreading “false information” about Russia’s military. Biden weighed in the next month, telling reporters “I’m serious about a prisoner exchange, I’m serious about doing all we can to free Americans being illegally held in Russia or anywhere else.”

In Philadelphia, Ella and her husband Mikhail were regularly stepping out to neighborhood restaurants to strategize with the Journal’s legal and executive team. By late summer, Ella had built up a contact network of sympathetic sources in the government. One Justice Department official had opened up to her after she’d sat down next to him on a train and asked for help. Another source kept her apprised when Victoria Nuland, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, took a meeting regarding her son. In prison letters, mother and son traded Kremlinology, using a coded nickname for the hit man Krasikov: “the German.” The Journal’s general counsel, who now turned to her for info, dubbed her “Ella the Reporter.”

Seeing her as an obvious asset, Journal leaders encouraged her networking. In September, Latour, the Journal’s publisher, helped her access the Very Very Important Persons section at a gala dinner at Cipriani in Manhattan thrown by the Atlantic Council think tank, where he was a board member. Her plan was to buttonhole Germany’s ambassador to Washington, but as she swiped through Google Image results to be sure she’d recognize him, she looked up to see Scholz himself.

The chancellor was hobnobbing with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. As he stepped aside, Ella walked up and pleaded for help freeing her son, Scholz understood immediately who she was, but had to quickly leave.

“We are helping. We are doing something,” he replied. The brief meeting left her confused about what was happening behind the scenes. She relayed the encounter to Carstens’s office. The special envoy, in turn, asked Grozev, the Bulgarian journalist, for the email address to Scholz’s chief of staff. Carstens had been asked to hold off on contacting Berlin, but he spoke German, had lived there and wasn’t always inclined to obey orders. He connected to the chancellery, which said a deal was possible. It would require a formal request. Carstens fed that up to Blinken.

In October, Sullivan, the national security adviser, called Plötner, his German counterpart. There was still no consensus in the German government, as Germany’s foreign minister and other government departments remained apprehensive. Berlin was hoping a formal, legal request from the U.S. would break the deadlock.

Meanwhile, the White House tried to see if Russia would accept a bundle of Russians convicted of nonviolent charges. The problem was, the U.S. penitentiary system was holding very few Russians the Kremlin might conceivably want. At one point, Carstens’s staff, scrounging for stock to trade, became so desperate that they haphazardly searched for Russian names on PACER, a publicly-available database of federal court records. Swept up onto the list: a U.S. citizen with a Russian-sounding name, who was only removed when an official pointed out the U.S. couldn’t send its own citizens to Russia.

In November, Washington offered the Kremlin four undercover operatives for Russia’s military and foreign intelligence agencies, held in Europe: so-called “illegals” who spent years creating a legend, or false identity. Two of them had been arrested in the tiny Alpine nation of Slovenia living as “Maria and Ludwig,” on false Argentine passports, who spoke to their children, and each other, in Spanish. In their suburban home, police found hundreds of thousands of euros in a hidden refrigerator compartment and specialized computer hardware to communicate securely with Moscow. 

There was a third—a Russian military intelligence officer using the identity of a Brazilian academic called “Jose”—in Norway. Poland had arrested the fourth, born in Moscow with a Spanish passport, on espionage charges near the Ukraine border.

Washington’s offer, meant to keep talks going, left Moscow frustrated. A prominent Russian intelligence officer backchannelled in texts to Grozev to ask why they couldn’t just trade Gershkovich for Krasikov? Russia had already decided to sentence him to 16 years, why not plead guilty and be swapped?

To Ella, Washington’s proposals were unserious. She decided to go on Fox News and throw a hand grenade.

“It’s been 250 days and Evan is not here, and the effort to do whatever it takes hasn’t been done,” she said in a slow, deliberate sound bite she’d rehearsed in her head.

Carstens, the special envoy, applauded the move and said he would show it to other families as an example of how to pressure the White House. But, to some in the administration, the interview was received as friendly fire. That afternoon, a State Department spokesman broke the secrecy around prisoner talks and told reporters that the U.S. had sent Russia “a number of proposals” for Gershkovich, none of them accepted. The Russians, who insisted such talks take place beyond public scrutiny, recoiled at the breach of protocol.

Ella had wanted to try to shake something loose, but scrolling through Russian media, she feared she had caused the talks to collapse.

”The U.S. government has literally turned on a kind of megaphone,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry complained days later. “The U.S. campaign in support of Gershkovich is literally drowning and discrediting him.” 

PUTIN NAMES HIS PRICE

Staring out into an auditorium packed with reporters, his shoulders slouched, Putin was about to signal publicly the same demand he had been reiterating privately since 2021: He wanted his hit man back.

Hundreds of journalists were waving placards in the air in the hopes of being called on. The president, who had rarely taken questions since invading Ukraine two years earlier, was finally facing the press at a December year-end conference. Though the moderator promised “a direct, honest, and open conversation,” the Kremlin had screened and approved the overwhelmingly flattering questions in advance. A New York Times reporter and friend of Gershkovich managed to get in an unscreened question: Why hadn’t Evan been freed?

Putin began his response by saying he didn’t know details of the journalist whose arrest he’d ordered on a video call months earlier—“your colleague was from an Austrian agency?”—before delivering a cryptic message, aimed at the Biden administration.

“I hope that we will find a solution,” he said. “But I repeat, the American side must hear us and make an appropriate decision. One that suits the Russian side as well.”

The subtext was clearly received in Berlin and Washington. When Sullivan again asked his German counterpart if Krasikov could be put on the table, he received word: not yet. But in Berlin, Scholz started moving pieces into place, telling cabinet members that he would, eventually, receive a formal request from America to discuss a trade involving Krasikov, and whatever their misgivings, he would take responsibility. Germany’s foreign minister Baerbock worried freeing Krasikov would invite Putin and every autocrat who admired him to snatch more hostages—but Blinken was speaking to her at length to persuade her of the moral logic.

In January, Ella flew into the World Economic Forum in Davos to meet Schmidt, Chancellor Scholz’s chief of staff, to ask for help: “You have the key,” she said. Schmidt was quiet, then pledged to help. That same day, Scholz and Biden spoke by phone about a meeting, to discuss the matter, in the White House. By Feb. 2, the train was in motion.

“For you, I will do this,” Scholz told Biden.

Just as Berlin and Washington outlined how a deal would work, Moscow was dealing with an unexpected new interlocutor, Tucker Carlson.

The former Fox News host was hammering out terms for an interview with Putin for his new straight-to-social-media talk show. Carlson told the president’s aides that he planned to request Putin free Gershkovich on the spot, during the interview. If all went well, he would take Evan home on his flight. An official close to Putin told the TV host it would be a “great idea” and could generate a positive response.

Near the end of his two-hour conversation, Carlson pushed his point: “This guy is obviously not a spy, he’s just a kid.”

“He’s being held hostage in exchange…Maybe it degrades Russia to do that.”

Putin demurred, then specified publicly for the first time the person he wanted in return: “a person serving a sentence in an allied country of the U.S.,” he said, leaning forward with an eyebrow arched.

After the interview, as Putin led Carlson on a tour of the Kremlin that stretched near midnight, the TV commentator returned their conversation to Gershkovich: “Why are you doing this?…It’s hurting you.”

Putin complained the problem lay in Washington. Russia had made its demand for the reporter clear, he said. Putin lamented that America didn’t do more to bring home its alleged spies.

The same day the interview aired, chalking up 200 million views, Scholz flew into Washington, heading straight to the Oval Office, with no notetakers and no aides. At the end of an hourlong meeting with Biden, the leaders formally agreed: Their countries would explore Krasikov as the centerpiece of a deal that would free numerous prisoners, including Navalny, Gershkovich, and the former Marine Whelan. Russia would get its spies held in Slovenia and Norway.

Word of the Navalny idea had already reached Putin, months earlier. The Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich had been asking to see Carstens, although the special envoy had been discouraged from taking the meeting. When both men found themselves in Tel Aviv after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, they met and Carstens broached the idea of a larger trade involving Navalny.

A couple of weeks after that meeting, Abramovich messaged with a surprising response: Putin was open. Carstens told the White House, which asked him to stop dealing with Russia cases.

On Feb. 16, heads of government, top security advisers, and intelligence chiefs from the U.S. and its NATO allies were arriving to the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering in the Bavarian city. Vice President Kamala Harris would brief the Slovenian officials involved in the still-nascent deal.

FBI Director Christopher Wray, also briefed on the coming trade, would hold talks with intelligence chiefs from across the West. Putin’s loathing of the event was well known—he had used it as a platform to lecture Western leaders about a post Cold War order in which America was the “one master, one sovereign.”

Grozev was in town, meeting German officials to understand the contours of the emerging deal. With him were members of Navalny’s inner circle, at turns excited for his release and anxious that Putin might, at this last minute, finally murder him. Carstens, though not officially on the attendee list, was in Munich as well, holding meetings on the margins to push matters along.

Western spy chiefs were just about to be served appetizers at a working lunch, when phones around the table started pinging. Navalny had abruptly died, at 47, of unclear causes in Russia’s “Polar Wolf” prison camp. The Kremlin didn’t explain the death.

Blinken’s staff scrambled to reach Navalny’s newly widowed wife, Yulia, and bring her through security for an emotional meeting, then to the auditorium to make a statement. She had been in Munich to discreetly push for the final details of her husband’s release. Now she was giving his eulogy in front of the world’s press.

“I want Putin, his entire entourage, Putin’s friends, his government, to know that they will bear responsibility for what they did to our country, to my family, to my husband,” she said. “And this day will come very soon.”

Afterward, Grozev sat with Carstens in a coffee shop outside the conference, mourning the death of his friend and a deal he had pushed for years in the shadows. The special envoy was blaming himself. Maybe, Carstens said, if he could have helped sew up a deal sooner, Navalny would be alive and free. 

‘I CAN SEE A PATHWAY’

Ella and Mikhail were rushing for the Amtrak train to Washington for a White House briefing on the emerging deal to free their son, when she looked at her phone and saw a cascade of text messages: The centerpiece of the exchange had died. She was shocked—then hopeful it could somehow create new urgency. Like her mom, she couldn’t allow herself despair.

“Unfortunately, whatever happened, happened,” Putin would later say, publicly uttering the name Navalny for the first time, and calling his chief opponent’s death a regrettable incident of the sort that also occurs in American prisons.

“It’s life.”

In the White House meeting, Sullivan, the national security adviser, had his head lowered toward the floor, avoiding eye contact. Carefully measuring every word, he explained to Ella and her husband Mikhail that he had always been skeptical that a deal involving Navalny would work out. But it wasn’t all lost, he said. Germany had already agreed to participate. “I can see a pathway,” he said.

On the world stage, Biden, Scholz and leaders of the European Union were condemning Putin. At Langley, CIA officers and analysts tried to make sense of the death and what it meant for an exchange.

The Biden administration was divided on whether and how to keep pushing forward. Returning quickly to the negotiating table could make the U.S. look too eager for a deal.

And did they need to give Germany time before rushing into a prisoner swap with a dictator accused of killing his most famous opponent?

By May, the German Federal Intelligence Service opened its own negotiation track with Russia, introducing its own stipulations: If they were going to release Krasikov, Berlin was going to want as many political prisoners and Germans facing draconian sentences in Russia as possible. Its chief pointman, former prosecutor Philipp Wolff, had become known in Berlin for an odd, if charming, negotiating tactic: Whenever talks grew testy, he would open up his briefcase and offer a chocolate.

Ella was at her second White House Correspondents’ Dinner that month and joined Biden’s handshake line to deliver another backchannel message, this time with more specificity. An official from Carstens’ office had told her to ask Biden to call the German leader to move things forward. And one of her sources had told her that it would be bad for Scholz to back out after making a commitment. To make her case, she’d have only seconds.

“We need more,” she said to the president. “Can you please call Chancellor Scholz?” Biden said he had made that call. Blinken, standing next to the president, looked down, then gently clarified, saying they would make the call. “I promise, I promise, I promise,” Biden said, before the handshake line moved on.

Two days later, President Biden sent a letter to Scholz, a formal request that gave the Chancellor the mechanism he needed to formalize a deal.

“Something like this has never been done before,” said Schmidt, the German chief of staff.

Through June and July U.S. intelligence officials met with their Russian counterparts in Middle Eastern capitals, while German negotiators held their own meetings. In Washington, Sullivan scrambled to sew up the deal just as an open insurrection erupted by Democrats hoping Biden would end his bid for a second term. Biden was hosting a July NATO summit, hoping a lively performance would quell doubts. At the summit, Sullivan seized the chance for a private word in person with European allies the U.S. was asking to free Russian spies. “We are almost there, you are doing an excellent job,” he told one delegation. The plan was set, and ready to “operationalize.”

Two days later, President Trump took a semiautomatic rifle shot to the ear, a quarter inch from his skull. Trump’s team had heard a deal was coming together. He had repeatedly said Putin would only free Gershkovich after he had won November’s election.

From self-quarantine in his Delaware home, Biden, testing positive for COVID-19, was tuning out frenzied speculation about his future to push the deal over its finish line. Slovenia still needed to tick through the final legal arrangements to ship back the spies it held—and time was running out. One Slovenian official texted a Journal reporter to say he was “shitting bricks.” Biden called Prime Minister Robert Golob to nudge things along, adding wistfully: “I’ve really got to get to Slovenia.” About an hour later, he announced he was leaving the presidential race.

The final deal coming together was unprecedented in its scale and complexity. It included Gershkovich and Krasikov, but also two other jailed journalists, Russian political prisoners, four Germans and the deep cover spies from Slovenia, Norway and Poland. The CIA director flew to Ankara, the site of the exchange, to discuss the logistics with Turkey’s spy chief. The agreement with Russia was fragile and one errant leak could blow the whole thing up.

Ella knew a trade was imminent when she went back to meet with Sullivan and noticed the national security adviser was looking her in the eyes. When Russia suddenly sped up her son’s trial into a three day process she understood. She stayed up all night on July 19, until the first images of his conviction came in, standing in the glass box of a packed Yekaterinburg courtroom, gaunt and tired, his head shaved as required by the Russian penal system. He stared out passively as a judge sentenced him to 16 years. Then, through his lawyers, he relayed a joke that reached his mother: He was expecting more.

The Russian Federation had a few final items of protocol to tick through with the man who had become its most famous prisoner. One, he would be allowed to leave with the papers he’d penned in detention, the letters he’d scrawled out and the makings of a book he’d labored over. But first, they had another piece of writing they required from him, an official request for presidential clemency. The text, moreover, should be addressed to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

The pro forma printout included a long blank space the prisoner could fill out if desired, or simply, as expected, leave blank. In the formal high Russian he had honed over 16 months imprisonment, the Journal’s Russia correspondent filled the page. The last line submitted a proposal of his own: After his release, would Putin be willing to sit down for an interview?

Yaroslav Trofimov contributed to this article

The spy unit that arrested a Wall Street Journal reporter is leading the biggest campaign of internal repression since the Stalin era

By Evan Gershkovich | With Drew Hinshaw, Joe Parkinson and Thomas Grove

ABOARD A RUSSIAN PRESIDENTIAL JET—The spy at the front of the cabin drew open the curtain.

Wearing a sand-colored jacket and brown shoes, with a salt-and-pepper goatee, the man had spent the past few hours organizing the final preparations for the largest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War. Now, as the pilots started the engines to take off for an airport in Turkey’s capital, he came out to look at the 16 prisoners he was escorting to freedom, a haul of Americans, Russians and Germans in their first hours fresh from jails and penal colonies.

Scanning the passengers, he locked his eyes squarely on one of those prisoners—me. He said nothing, staring in silence for nearly a minute. Then he turned and walked back to his curtained-off section of the presidential jet. I was left to wonder about this man at the helm of the exchange, who appeared to hold my fate in his hands.

When I was arrested by Russia’s security forces in 2023—the first foreign correspondent charged with espionage since the Cold War—I never stopped reporting. On my release I set out to identify the man who had taken me, and to learn more about the spy unit that had carried out his orders.

During my 16 months’ imprisonment, colleagues at The Wall Street Journal had been asking parallel questions.

Together, we have identified the man behind the curtain as Lt. Gen. Dmitry Minaev and can now reveal a trove of fresh details about the unit that he runs: the Department for Counterintelligence Operations. Known as DKRO, it is at the very core of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s opaque wartime regime. The story of how it got there reveals much about how Russia’s autocratic system became entangled in a broiling conflict with the West.

Among our findings:

• DKRO has played an enormous and unreported role in plunging Russia into its biggest wave of repression since the demise of Joseph Stalin, including a purge of the Defense Ministry after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine faltered. 
• The department was ordered to secure the release from Germany of Vadim Krasikov, a Russian hit man convicted in the 2019 assassination of a Putin enemy in a Berlin park.
• DKRO then accelerated a campaign of arresting American citizens on Russian soil, including basketball star Brittney Griner. DKRO used former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan and me as trade bait to secure the release of Krasikov.
• Among DKRO’s other missions was to harass and surveil Western diplomats in Russia, even pressuring students in the U.S. Embassy high school to spy on their classmates.

Despite DKRO’s growing importance to the regime, there was almost no mention of the agency anywhere on the internet until the Journal reported last year that it was behind my arrest. It didn’t even have a Wikipedia page. Almost nobody outside of a tight circle of Russia experts and intelligence officers had ever heard of it.

The more we tugged at this simple question—who in Russia was arresting Americans?—the more we revealed the secret inner machinery that has made it possible for Putin to tighten the screws across Russia’s 11 time zones, creating what a U.N. special rapporteur on human rights called an atmosphere of political persecution “unprecedented in recent history.”

DKRO, one person familiar with the unit’s operations said, was like the axle on a car. Without it, the entire machine would cease to function.

Though it numbers only about 2,000 officers, according to U.S. and European officials, DKRO is the Kremlin’s most elite security force. It wields the power to compel hundreds of thousands of personnel across Russia into surveilling, intimidating, or arresting foreigners and the Russians it suspects of working with them. DKRO officers are generously paid, even by the standards of Russia’s powerful and sprawling Federal Security Service, or FSB, of which it is part.

They enjoy bonuses for successful operations and access to low-cost mortgages, even the best time slots at Russia’s beachside resorts. Not a single DKRO officer is known to have defected to the West, according to U.S. and European officials.

To understand how power really flows in Putin’s security state, we tracked the unseen rise of this shadowy unit of elite spies. We spoke to Russians and Westerners targeted by DKRO, and U.S. and European security and intelligence officials and diplomats who have tried to learn its secrets. Former Russian security officials, exiles and dissidents added their own takes.

Along the way, two of my Journal colleagues were openly followed through the streets of Vienna and Washington in acts of surveillance apparently designed to intimidate. In the hours after one article was published, they were inundated with hundreds of spam emails alongside password-reset attempts. One reporter received a message through an intermediary that the FSB wanted to invite him to Moscow for questioning. The Russian Foreign Ministry would later label two of them as persona non grata.

At home, DKRO has ordered the arrests of hundreds of Russians accused of spying, collaborating or treason. After Putin’s invasion of Ukraine faltered, the agency largely responsible for its planning—the FSB—won an internal power struggle over who should take the blame, according to U.S. and European officials.

DKRO, along with the FSB’s military-intelligence wing, led a purge of the Defense Ministry, Western security officials said. Dozens of defense officials were accused of corruption. In a chilling historical echo, many were bundled into Lefortovo—the infamous Moscow prison where DKRO’s Stalin-era predecessors sent purged Communists and Nazi spies to be tortured and executed.

In March 2023, I was taken into the same prison by a group of FSB operatives that oversee Rosgvardia, Russia’s National Guard, known as Military Unit 3600, under DKRO’s command.

It was a unique vantage point to observe how such a small cadre of officers has managed to help turn the world’s largest country into a tightly controlled police state. The 9-by-12-foot cells of the maximum-security facility were regularly welcoming new Russian officials and accused collaborators arrested under DKRO’s supervision for spying on behalf of the West or colluding with Ukraine. So many people have been jailed there on espionage or treason cases since the start of the war that FSB officials with the First Investigative Department told me they had doubled their staffing.

It was at Lefortovo that I came to understand the power of the shadowy force that had taken away my freedom. In one of the First Investigative Department’s offices, under the watch of two portraits of Putin and a third of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet Union’s first secret police service, the chief investigator on my case explained that I had been arrested and charged as a CIA agent because DKRO had said that’s what I was. “That’s enough for me,” the investigator said.

Death to Spies

DKRO is rooted in some of the Soviet Union’s bloodiest and most ruthless traditions.

In World War II, as Nazi agents infiltrated the Soviet Union, Stalin developed an umbrella counterintelligence agency meant to catch the spies wreaking havoc behind the front lines.

The agency, named SMERSH, a Russian abbreviation for Smert’ Shpionam, or Death to Spies, developed a toolbox of tricks meant to identify the Nazi collaborators and lure them into elaborate traps where they were taken prisoner or killed.

With the war’s end, SMERSH was folded back into the secret services agency that became the KGB. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the KGB collapsed as well, split into three separate and competing agencies by President Boris Yeltsin.

Putin ran one of those agencies, the FSB, and when he became president in 2000 it emerged on top. His first FSB director, Nikolai Patrushev, came to see Russia as a fortress besieged by the West and elevated DKRO’s role in monitoring visiting American businesspeople and diplomats, according to a former chief of a European intelligence agency.

Visiting the FSB’s Lubyanka headquarters to address its board each spring, there is one data point Putin almost always reads aloud: the number of spies captured over the preceding 12 months. The statistic carries a thinly veiled imperative, that next year’s number should surpass the last. 

In 2011, Russian security forces said they caught 199 individuals spying on behalf of the Kremlin’s adversaries. By 2020: 495. At least 53 Russians were known to have been convicted of treason in the first eight months of this year alone, compared with just four in 2018. They include Ksenia Karelina, a Russian-American spa receptionist and ballerina from Los Angeles, sentenced to 12 years in August for donating $51.80 to a charity supporting Ukraine.

“Because foreigners are now enemies, we always have to catch them,” said Mikhail Kasyanov, prime minister during Putin’s first term and now an opposition figure, in an interview. “Or make them up.”

Neither the Kremlin nor the FSB responded to requests for comment.

Not long ago, policing economic crimes, not quashing dissent, paved the path to power for an officer in Russia’s FSB. Officers could extort contracts or business deals by opening a spurious investigation. At one point before the war, the FSB was probing one in six Russian businessmen.

Today, espionage and treason cases are the most valuable currency for ambitious FSB officers. The spy agency’s alumni so dominate Russia’s elite that some 80% of Putin’s top-level officials are current or former members of the security forces, including the FSB.

In the final years of the Soviet Union, the comparable number was just 3%, according to sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaya.

As the war supercharged the presidential appetite for spies and traitors—real or imagined—the job of satisfying it fell to DKRO. Putin’s invasion gave DKRO an “entirely new raison d’etre…catching spies at home and going head-to-head with U.S. intelligence in Ukraine,” said Boris Volodarsky, a former Russian military-intelligence officer who is now a fellow at London’s Royal Historical Society.

DKRO isn’t the only agency on the hunt: As the war in Ukraine rumbles on, institutions of all sizes are expected to report suspicions upward. Like a stage manager behind the curtain, DKRO’s role is to design and orchestrate operations yet rarely be seen. To do this, it borrows top officers from other FSB departments for specific tasks, then rotates them out.

“Once the team is assembled they’re given carte blanche,” said a Russian former counterintelligence officer, who worked in a different agency. “They have access to technology, they might have technology support staff, and they’ll have whatever cover they need.”

DKRO leaders also enjoy rare access to Putin himself. One of the few Russian officials privileged enough to play ice hockey with the president is the head of the FSB’s first service, which oversees DKRO, Lt. Gen. Vladislav Menschikov. He personally briefed Putin before and after my arrest, the Journal reported while I was incarcerated. Barely known outside a small circle of Russia analysts, the spy chief previously ran the presidential directorate responsible for Russia’s nuclear bunkers.

His subordinate, who runs DKRO itself—the goateed Lt. Gen Minaev—has a hands-on role in selecting which Americans to arrest, and which Russians to trade them for. Awarded the prestigious Hero of Russia medal for bravery during Russia’s war in Chechnya, he is described by intelligence chiefs who have met him as frighteningly perceptive. “He understands everything about his environment—everything,” said one Western officer who has met him several times. “He knows immediately who is a shark and who is a pussy.”

Minaev usually stays in the shadows, but he was present from the beginning to the end of the Aug. 1 swap. I first saw him when I was escorted from the Lefortovo prison onto a gray coach with other prisoners on the morning of the exchange. At 10:30 a.m., Minaev climbed aboard and stood at the front, resting his arms on the backs of two seats on either side of the aisle. He was a representative of the FSB, he announced, and we prisoners were gathered for an exchange. He didn’t give his name.

The longtime intelligence officer who accompanied him was formerly head of the DKRO subdivision that tracks foreign journalists, its “Tenth Department.” Sergei Latkov now works for Putin at the presidential administration, according to flight manifests seen by the Journal. 

Latkov was the first Russian official Putin welcomed when the presidential jet returned to Moscow, carrying the Russian prisoners the West freed in exchange: a collection of deep-cover spies, hackers, and a hit man.

On the day of the swap, the Russian dissident hacking group Black Mirror, which sells data about Russian officials, posted on its Telegram channel a purported photo featuring Latkov and Alexei Komkov, the former head of DKRO who now runs the FSB’s foreign-intelligence wing, playing billiards. The tableau was reminiscent of a scene from a Soviet action movie, “The Elusive Avengers,” with the spies posing as the bad guys. Black Mirror also posted a still from that scene, under the tagline: “The Game.”

U.S. officials blame DKRO for a string of strange incidents that blurred the lines between spycraft and harassment, including the mysterious death of a U.S. diplomat’s dog, the trailing of an ambassador’s young children and flat tires on embassy vehicles.

In 2020, a DKRO officer told a local student at the U.S. Embassy school in Moscow, popular among the capital’s foreign diplomatic corps, that his mother had been detained and would be released only if the student started hanging out with those named on a list of diplomats’ children, and reported on their families’ hobbies and vacation plans. Russian authorities later ordered the school closed.

There is another set of visitors the unit has taken a keen interest in: middle-aged American men with military or defense-contracting careers, flying in to be with younger Russian women, or occasionally men, they’ve met online or through dating apps. Several months before Putin invaded Ukraine, America’s Moscow embassy sent a memo to Washington warning that the number of Russian women requesting K-1 fiancée visas to marry American men with security clearances was statistically improbable.

The German Foreign Ministry in March cautioned its nationals visiting Russia to “be careful with Tinder, Hinge, Bumble and the like,” noting that “Russia is currently not the best travel destination for a first date with an online flirt.”

DKRO’s officers also increasingly operate on foreign soil, recruiting spies and conducting sabotage operations in Eastern Europe. In former Soviet states, DKRO has organized kidnappings, Eastern European officials say. When foreigners cross key border points, like the Estonian Narva post where the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s boundaries meet Russian soil, DKRO has local FSB officers systematically interrogate them, hoping to recruit or threaten visitors into spying on their homelands. Officers working for the unit once dashed across the border, setting off a smoke grenade then dragging an Estonian security official into Russia for use in a later trade for a Russian spy held by Estonia.

As part of Russia’s campaign in Ukraine, DKRO is sabotaging railroads and gathering intelligence on high-ranking officials, likely to prepare assassination attempts or targeted acts of violence, a Western intelligence official said. Ukrainian officials say it was Minaev himself who ordered officers to detonate two car bombs in Kyiv in 2017. The blasts killed officials from the country’s military and domestic intelligence agencies, the HUR and the SBU. Minaev was also behind an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov, Ukrainian officials said.

But the agency’s primary focus is internal, where Russia’s growing conflict with the West has only intensified Putin’s obsession with spies. One former Russian intelligence officer described an extraordinary twist: The president at one point established a counterintelligence committee to look for collaborators among the ranks of counterintelligence agencies looking for collaborators among ordinary Russians.

DKRO has managed “to make counterintelligence the pre-eminent FSB branch,” said Andrei Soldatov, the exiled founder of investigative website Agentura.ru, “and vital for protecting the political regime.”

Bojan Pancevski contributed to this article.

A quiet suburban mom, a hard-drinking war correspondent and an Arctic researcher were hiding in plain sight, championed by the Kremlin’s No. 1 fan of spy fiction

By Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson

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 would complain, was like finding a needle hiding in a needle stack. Few would prove as well-concealed as Kadivnik’s target.

The story of how the West hunted those sleeper agents has never been told. Wall Street Journal reporters worked on three continents and spoke to more than 30 former and current officials in the countries where they operated: Slovenia, Argentina, Norway, Greece, Poland, Ukraine, the U.K., Canada and the U.S. Hundreds of court documents and personal records revealed painstakingly built false biographies, from a fraudulent Mexican passport to a doctored Greek birth certificate. The spies left behind a trail of confused friends, colleagues, and romantic partners, more than two dozen of whom spoke in detail about the people they thought they knew.

The clandestine transnational pursuit hinged on lucky breaks and leaps of faith. One country after the next would identify a spy only to face the same ethical quandary: Should the illegals be outed, to end their activities, or silently studied to unlock their networks and the riddle of why Putin invests so much in this mysterious tradition? Each day brought the risk that the prey could catch wind and flee. By the time the Greek National Intelligence Service went to investigate a Russian woman living undercover, she had already vanished, cleaning out her knitwear boutique in the shadow of the Acropolis, leaving a longtime boyfriend bereft and confused. 

Kadivnik was determined not to let his targets, whoever they were, slip away. Tall with a shaved head, the intelligence chief had spent so long running operations against organized crime bosses that colleagues joked he’d adopted their flair for chunky silver neckchains and salty language. This next operation would have to proceed without a single leak in a country of just 2.1 million where a significant percentage still sympathized with Russia.

The spies he was after were much closer than he realized: a husband and wife living in a quiet suburban lane less than 3 miles from his office. The couple had spent more than a decade molding themselves into an Argentine family of four, all of them conversing in fluent Spanish. Not even their own children knew who they really were.

The Shield and Sword

In 1968, a 15-year-old Vladimir Putin watched the biggest Soviet TV spectacle of the year: “The Shield and Sword.” The four-part miniseries heralded the fictional exploits of a Communist agent whose masterful command of German allowed him to pass as “Johann Weiss,” an SS officer delicately extracting the Third Reich’s deepest secrets.

The U.S.S.R. was stagnating behind the capitalist West, but its films, novels and even postage stamps were celebrating a human weapon Moscow possessed that Washington lacked: sleeper agents. In Soviet mythology, these heroes were the antithesis of James Bond, chameleons who could blend into the enemy’s nest, surviving not on martini-infused bravado and a license to kill, but on patience, wits and a monk-like capacity to sacrifice in service to the motherland.

Decades later, Putin would recall the effect the TV thriller had on him. He studied German in high school, then walked into his local KGB office and volunteered for a life undercover.

The young Putin had become entranced by a tradition whose origins stretched back to the 1917 Revolution, when the new Bolshevik government, unrecognized and encircled by hostile neighbors, couldn’t place spies under diplomatic cover in embassies abroad. Instead, its Communist agents acquired new passports. They honed second languages to operate as sleepers behind enemy lines. The spies had a unique strength (they could operate undetected) offset by a weakness (they had no diplomatic immunity and could thus be arrested for espionage).

Back in the U.S.S.R., their legend burned bright through stories of illegals like Rudolf Abel, who helped steal atomic secrets and was later depicted in Steven Spielberg’s “Bridge of Spies.” In reality, illegals often grew bored and depressed, burdened with long stretches between instructions and the constant stress of withholding a double life from the friends, lovers, spouses and children they accumulated abroad. Some simply walked away from their missions, joining the prosperity of the unsuspecting West, taking their secrets to their graves.

The KGB didn’t offer young Putin a chance to vanish into Europe as an illegal, though he would later claim to have managed several as an officer posted to 1980s Dresden. In his first-ever TV appearance, in 1991, he re-enacted the closing scene from a Soviet spy drama about an illegal in Berlin. That year, the Soviet Union collapsed and shortly after a fledgling democratic government broke the KGB into smaller, weakened agencies, leaving the West to assume the illegals program would expire.

In truth, the Soviet collapse left a network of sleeper agents stranded abroad, still living undercover, awaiting orders from a vanished empire. By the turn of the millennium, Putin was president, reinvigorating the program he’d idolized as a young man.

Under his watch, dedicated schools trained an army of new recruits in the languages, history and cultural habits of target countries. Young officers were encouraged to marry fellow agents, for cover and to ward off loneliness. Many studied Spanish and Portuguese to deploy to Latin America, where Russia could exploit patchy birth records and corrupt officials to more quickly secure a new identity. They could be activated at Putin’s direction.

In American suburbs, FBI agents were stalking the secret agents, watching from auditorium seats at their children’s school functions, or sneaking into their colonial-style homes in the dead of night to plant bugs and copy the floppy disks they used to communicate. By 2010, the FBI swooped in, announcing the arrest of 10 undercover spies. At least four had children, now left to wrestle with the revelation of their parents’ identity, and the question of where was home. 

Another spy, Anna Chapman, had left behind a trail of former lovers and a confused ex-husband, a story condensed under headlines like “Russian spy babe’s hot affair.” Within two weeks of their arrest, all of the spies were swapped on a Vienna runway for four Russians Moscow had imprisoned for collaborating with the West, including Sergei Skripal, a military-intelligence officer who had given MI6 the names of Russian agents.

Putin’s most prized agents were reduced to tabloid fodder and later inspiration for a six-season FX series, “The Americans.” After their return, Putin joined the illegals in front of a live band for a rousing singalong of the theme song from “The Shield and Sword,” entitled “Where Does the Motherland Begin?”

The Obama administration sang a different tune. Eager to maintain its “reset” of relations with Moscow, senior officials played down the discovery of Russian spies living in suburbia as an anachronistic artifact of the Cold War.

It was anything but. Almost as soon as the swap was over, another generation of illegals was heading back into the field, their operations relayed in regular briefings to Russia’s most powerful fan of spy fiction.

The Boot

Pablo González was a spy hiding in plain sight.

When protesters thronged the streets of Kyiv, braving gunfire to oust their pro-Russian government in 2014, the bearded freelance reporter was in the crowd, charming pro-Western activists with his booming baritone and a taste for danger. Early on, the photojournalists he teamed up with noticed he tended to bash out articles after several beers. Closing his laptop, he would talk animatedly about the Kremlin’s military strategy—or the women he’d conquered.

He explained his fluent Russian with shifting stories, at first telling a few friends he had studied it in college before explaining the full picture: He had spent part of his childhood in Russia, where his grandfather had fled after the Spanish Civil War.

Born Pavel Rubtsov in Moscow, he had left Russia with his mother for Spain’s Basque Country when he was 9. There, he took his mother’s maiden name, González. Spanish authorities would later suspect he had been recruited by the GRU, Russia’s military-intelligence agency, on a visit to see his father and stepmother around 2010.

González, who had fathered four children by a Spanish wife and Russian girlfriend, was an attractive potential asset. The bilingual and truly bicultural news reporter could use his freelance writing for Spanish media outlets as cover for operations. The GRU could offer him money and membership in a secret army to help them monitor two of their key targets, Ukraine’s westernizing army and Russia’s exiled opposition.

Within a year of Ukraine’s 2014 revolution, he had charmed and drunk his way into the company of the lawmakers, press secretaries and customs officials of the new Ukraine, cataloging his victories in text files he left on his laptop, under innocuous headings like “Business Trip to Ukraine.” His handlers would urge him to be more careful, to delete incriminating documents. He, in turn, would bill them for the tiniest expenses, down to the cheap bottles of wine he brought to meetings with Russians living in exile.

Meanwhile, officials at Ukraine’s Defense Ministry took a liking to the daring, garrulous war reporter, and regularly invited him to functions, including a 2016 tour of a base near the Polish border where he witnessed new NATO-structured military exercises and spoke with U.S. and Canadian instructors.

The next year, González on his own initiative tried to befriend Putin’s most feared opponent, opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who had traveled to Barcelona for eye treatment after unknown assailants attacked him with antiseptic green dye. González slipped into the clinic, offered Navalny help translating and navigating Barcelona, then took a selfie with him. He later sent his GRU handlers the address and descriptive details of the hospital, even the Wi-Fi passwords of a cafe where Navalny’s supporters were hanging out. Months later, he joined the protest leader for an evening of drinks with prominent Russian opposition figures, none of them wise to the GRU spy at their table.

González was working for the GRU’s 5th Department, one of two competing directorates Putin had expanded to seed sleeper agents abroad. The GRU encouraged its officers, nicknamed “Boots,” to take risks for quick results. For a Boot, the fluent Spanish-speaker was an unusual asset. Usually, the GRU trained and dispatched illegals so fast that their accents still betrayed a Slavic lilt. They sometimes tried to explain themselves with patchy back stories that fell apart under even light scrutiny.

The Boots’ rivals were the “Slippers” of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, who prided themselves on floating undetected. SVR operatives spent so many years acculturating themselves to the minute details of their supposed homelands—the way its citizens hold their cutlery, stand at a bar or smoke cigarettes—that the best could pass for natives of countries they only arrived in as adults. They were patient. And just as Pablo González began hopping around Ukraine, two of them, more tortoise-like, had arrived in Buenos Aires.

The Slippers

On June 14, 2013, a diminutive woman with mousy brown hair calling herself María Rosa Mayer Muños walked into the Italian hospital in Buenos Aires, with barely an hour left in her pregnancy, to face one of her most difficult endeavors as an undercover spy: birthing a child without betraying her true identity.

Obstetrician Mario Pérez had already logged in his notes that the woman had conspicuously little interaction with staff at the private hospital, one of the best in the Argentine capital. She had waited more than halfway through her term to book her first consultation. Now she walked into the basement delivery room fully dilated, he said. “She made us all run!”

Dr. Pérez had no idea that “Maria” was Anna Dultseva, on a yearslong journey to transform her life into the perfect lie. 

Born in the Soviet city of Gorky, she married her husband Artem in 2004, then joined the SVR with him, she later told the spy service’s magazine. She spent three years in immersive training to transform herself into an alter-ego, built on documents seen by the Journal. First, she secured the Greek birth certificate of a dead child, doctored to claim the mother was Mexican. She used that to obtain a Mexican passport. Finally, she moved to Argentina in 2012 to join Artem, who was using the fraudulent papers of Ludwig Gisch, born in Namibia to an Argentine mother.

They lived in a building in the middle-class Buenos Aires neighborhood of Belgrano, attracting little attention among the 146 apartments and rarely attending tenants’ meetings. The concierge saw them come and go at routine times, with Artem usually wearing a tie.

By 2014 they had both secured Argentine citizenship and Anna was pregnant again. In the delivery room, medical staff had noticed she was calm—barely speaking, save for some quiet words for her husband in fluent Spanish. “This woman has a very high tolerance for pain,” Dr. Pérez said. The couple cooed over their new son, Daniel—a true Argentine citizen by birth, like his older sister, Sophie. No one came to visit them.

Anna and Artem were still building their cover. On Sept. 14, 2015, they married under their assumed names, Maria and Ludwig, a service in an otherwise empty building attended by two witnesses from Colombia, one of whom spoke to the Journal. The family marked birthdays privately, without inviting other children.

Nobody in the tiny circle of parents she interacted with seemed to notice anything odd about Anna’s accent or life story, other than a quiet sense of loneliness. Artem’s Spanish betrayed the lightest touch of something foreign, a trace he chalked up to his childhood in Africa. Forbidden from watching TV, their children ate healthy food and took swimming lessons.

In 2017, the two Slippers got a message from their handler. After more than a decade building their cover it was time to secure new visas and deploy for the next stage of their mission: Slovenia, in the heart of Europe.

First, there was a troubling wrinkle they would have to iron out to avoid detection. In the Argentine civil registry where their wedding record was stored, Anna had listed her mother’s nationality as Austrian, a falsehood Slovenia could easily check with its northern neighbor. In formal, immaculate Spanish, the young mother filed a petition for the Argentine registry to correct her mother’s origin from Austria to Mexico, whose birth records Slovenia would be less likely to consult.

But the change was detected by an officer processing their immigration paperwork in the Slovenian Interior Ministry—who found it unusual enough to note, though not suspicious enough to raise alarm. The visas for the Argentine family were approved and soon the Slippers were buckled into a trans-Atlantic flight, leaving behind only $21 in a Buenos Aires bank account and a credible-enough trail, if anyone ever cared to check.

The Boot, Pablo González, was already in Europe, traveling along Ukraine’s battle lines and spying on a circle of drinking buddies that widened from war correspondents to dissidents. What he didn’t know was that the U.S. and its allies were on his tracks.

The Spy Catchers

Behind the passkey-activated doors that separated them from the rest of the CIA’s Langley headquarters, the officers at Russia House were piecing through a gathering stack of reports chronicling the double life of Pablo González.

For years the storied CIA division, formally known as Mission Center for Europe and Eurasia, had operated from the same warren of cubicles and offices as the agency shifted focus toward the War on Terror. But by 2017, the dozens of Russia analysts, officers and “targeters” scouring communications, official files and business records were tracing the contours of an expanding Russian spy network that included González.

Since 2014, Spain’s Centro Nacional de Inteligencia had been tracking the jet-setting reporter. In time, so were their counterparts at MI6 and in Poland, where he had been interviewing members of a new left-wing party and would begin dating a local freelance journalist.

For the spy catchers, this Boot was a bargain. The more he threw himself into missions, at times of his own volition, the more the Spanish and Americans could map his handlers, contacts, allies and command chain. Western officials studying the bilingual spy admired his natural talent and zest for the dangerous work, even as slips in tradecraft allowed them to track his network. One agency was able to find his documents uploaded onto a cloud service.

The hard-drinking war correspondent embodied an old spycraft dilemma: Once you catch a spy, should you intervene to stop their mission? Or silently follow them, to harvest more secrets? The CIA analysts in Russia House and their Spanish counterparts were inclined to keep watching.

He was becoming romantic with Zhanna Nemtsova, the grieving, exiled daughter of Boris Nemtsov, a Putin critic recently murdered near the walls of the Kremlin. She lent the Spaniard her father’s old laptop and he slipped the device’s email archive onto a thumb drive.

Then, on March 4, 2018, two GRU agents visiting England’s sleepy town of Salisbury smeared the nerve agent Novichok on the door of Skripal, the exiled Russian defector who had given the names of Russian spies to the British. The elderly ex-spy survived, but the would-be assassins’ careless discarding of a chemical weapon in a garbage bin ultimately killed a local mother of three. Her death galvanized a new round of attention on the GRU.

The U.K. pushed allies to expel more than 150 Russian diplomats in Europe and North America, largely intelligence officers working in embassies. Going forward, Russia would need to rely even more on its sleeper spies.

Before, intelligence agencies at times had brushed aside the dangers of Putin’s fixation with illegals. Now, they increased information sharing, scheduling rounds of face-to-face meetings with liaisons in embassies and check-ins over secure channels including the Battlefield Information Collection and Exploitation Systems created by NATO for wartime communication.

New personnel were posted to Russia House, tasked with the painstaking detective work of tracking the illegals’ flows of money, personnel and logistics. Analysts were surprised to see that the GRU was still acquiring passports through the old Cold War tactic of misusing a dead baby’s birth certificate. Soon, the CIA began identifying Boots.

One, Sergey Vladimirovich Cherkasov, who posed as Victor Ferreira, a Brazilian graduate student, was caught by a résumé slipup: The CIA noticed he had worked at a travel agency in Rio de Janeiro that they suspected was run by a GRU officer. By 2018, he was motorcycling each morning through Washington, D.C., studying American foreign policy and international economics at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Though students puzzled over his odd accent, he ingratiated himself with professors unaware that their pupil was a GRU officer born in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

Another Boot they found was Mikhail Mikushin, undercover as José Assis Giammaria, an eager student at Canada’s Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary. He was also struggling to convince his schoolmates that he truly was Brazilian. After what he claimed was a trip home to renew his visa, Giammaria passed out Rio de Janeiro souvenir bottle opener keychains to every student in his class.

What the Western pursuers didn’t know, and wouldn’t for years, is that two more spies had managed to slip right past them.

Now ensconced in a two-story home in the suburbs of Ljubljana, the quiet capital of Slovenia, the Dultsevs cut a low profile. They spoke to their children only in Spanish, and wouldn’t attempt even a sentence in Slovenian—the Slavic language was too close to Russian, and their native accent might poke through. Neighbors noticed little about the family who never entertained visitors and whose belongings, down to their white Kia Ceed sedan and the bike the husband pedaled downtown daily, all seemed designed to attract as little attention as possible.

The couple said almost nothing about their past except to blame crime in Buenos Aires for their move. Neighbors overheard the Dultsevs’ children playing in the garden, jabbering in Spanish, but the parents hardly ever stayed long outside. Anna was hardly ever photographed, with a rare exception: One Wednesday in late November 2019, she joined a Christmas decorating party in her daughter’s kindergarten classroom, flashing a strained smile over the caption, “A real Christmas spirit was in the air.”

For work, she had set up Art Gallery 5’14, an online company buying and selling mostly modern art. Hardly anyone in Slovenia’s small community of artists would remember anything at all about the unassuming mother of two whose office happened to sit a few steps from a European Union gas and energy regulator. The gallery claimed to work with 90 artists across the world and posted several images to its prolific social-media accounts almost daily. Strikingly, not a single picture showed her face.

The Trap

Pablo González was flying closer to the sun.

Colleagues in the Spanish press corps had been gossiping over his ample supply of top-shelf cameras and expensive drones. He had been freelancing for U.S. government-funded Voice of America while airing Kremlin-sympathetic views on hourlong YouTube videos. He even attended a training hosted by Bellingcat, the open-source investigative outfit that unmasked Russian spies at a clip the analysts at Russia House often envied. His on-off romantic partner Nemtsova, the prominent Putin critic, had started to confide suspicions to other exiles about the well-connected reporter for small Spanish newspapers who took expensive weekslong trips to Ukrainian warzones.

One night, in November 2021, over beers in eastern Poland, he made a grand prediction to a small group of fellow foreign correspondents: Putin was about to invade Ukraine.

His cover unraveled three months later. Taking extended video footage of defensive positions along Ukraine’s eastern front, he spooked anxious soldiers bracing themselves for an impending invasion. Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency immediately asked him to visit their Kyiv headquarters, where they questioned him for hours, probing his finances, career and where exactly he was born.

The same place as you, González shot back. The Soviet Union.

González was in a belligerent mood that night, downing drinks faster than other war reporters could keep up and laughing about the Ukrainian officers who’d scanned his phone and warned him to depart the country. He stepped out to call the Spanish embassy, which encouraged him to heed the advice. He flew to Istanbul to meet his handlers, then visited Spain for a brief stopover with his wife, before returning to Warsaw, reconnecting with his Polish girlfriend. He told journalists he’d left Ukraine because his Spanish ID was set to expire. All the while he was being tracked by British intelligence.

Just as Putin’s invasion moved ahead, the U.K. sent a tip to one of Poland’s top security officials: Did they know Pablo González was back in town?

One of the largest international arms transfers since World War II was under way at a small airport in Poland, where giant military cargo planes, loaded with equipment bound for Ukraine, were landing hourly. González, they would come to realize, had visited the airport, typing detailed notes on its layout and logistics on his new laptop. 

Polish officers watched as González and his Polish girlfriend returned late on the night of Feb. 27, 2022, to the makeshift housing of a student dormitory near the border. The couple had been squabbling over his relations with other women. Shortly before midnight, a knock came at the door and officers filled the room, frisking them both then pulling González aside. He said nothing as they led him away.

The next morning, the Spanish woke up to learn the spy they’d hoped to keep studying had gone dark—the Poles hadn’t warned them.

In interrogations, González said he was worth a lot to the Kremlin and suggested they trade him for Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent dissident, one of the officials dealing with the case said. Back in Spain, his lawyer and supporters launched a campaign saying he was guilty of nothing except journalism. González, who didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment, never admitted publicly to being a spy.

Neither the Kremlin, nor Russia’s foreign and military intelligence agencies, the SVR and GRU, responded to questions seeking comment.

On the other side of Europe, the CIA was delivering a tip to the officers of the Netherlands’ national security and defense intelligence agencies. The Brazilian Johns Hopkins graduate Victor Ferreira—Cherkasov, the GRU deep-cover officer—would soon be flying in to take an internship at The Hague’s International Criminal Court.

Russia House hoped the Dutch would keep watching him, but Dutch officials debating the stakes felt doing nothing could allow a Russian spy to access the building and email system of a court whose prosecutors had war crimes cases against Russia as far back as 2008.

Tall, with coiffed blond hair, Cherkasov walked through Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport in April to find Dutch authorities waiting to pull him aside then scan his devices. Like González, he’d been sloppy: Hidden on a laptop was his legend, or cover story, that ran just four large-text pages, much of it an elaborate explanation for his peculiar accent and why, unlike most Brazilians, he didn’t eat fish.

The Dutch deported him back to Brazil in the hopes that the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva would be a cooperative partner against Russian espionage. The country would hold him on a fraudulent passport charge. He arrived with a handwritten sign taped to his suitcase by the Dutch, a pun on São Paulo’s international airport code: “To GRU.”

José Assis Giammaria—GRU officer Mikushin—was next. The University of Calgary graduate was now a security studies researcher in Norway’s Arctic city of Tromsø, where police grabbed him on the way to work. Just like that, the West had rolled up three illegals in quick succession.

Yet there was an evidence trail pointing to another pair, who were proving far harder to track. The hunt began shortly after the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, when Josko Kadivnik, the director of Slovenia’s Owl, received his invitation to fly to London.

The Family

Armed with a vague tip from MI6, Kadivnik built his investigative team slowly, inviting only the most trusted underlings into his office, framed by a metallic mosaic of an owl.

Most of the officers wouldn’t be told the full scope of their mission and were frequently rotated over months of slow policework. For the few who knew the truth, Kadivnik checked their pockets for loyalty: Select officers were given a gold coin emblazoned with an owl, a symbol of their tightknit club. If ever he found them without their coin, they would have to treat their colleagues to a round of drinks.

It isn’t clear how, in the needle stack of foreign-born residents, the officers slowly homed in on an Argentine family living at number 35 Primožičeva Street, a quiet suburban lane on the outskirts of the capital. Maria Rosa Mayer Muños had been flying to art fairs in London and Edinburgh, melding into an industry where laundered money and fraud mixed with high society. Was she legitimate? Slovenia’s national security adviser Vojko Volk, an erudite former ambassador to Italy, studied her paintings, noting that they all seemed unimpressive, like new-age art sold cheaply to clueless tourists.

Poring through the family’s bank accounts, investigators puzzled over whether the tuition of her children’s private British-curriculum academy was within their means. Her husband, Ludwig Gisch, had set up an online IT business selling domain names and cloud hosting, but it only had four followers on X, including the account of his wife’s business. He had promptly filed his tax returns, reviewed by the Journal, in 2021 claiming revenues of 40,000 euros alongside his wife’s 23,000.

Neither husband nor wife ever got so much as a parking ticket. Their operations security appeared nearly perfect, except for one error: Deep in their immigration records, Kadivnik could still see where the Interior Ministry had wondered, why had she changed her mother’s nationality from Austrian to Mexican? Now, the odd rectification added to a convincing body of evidence that the Argentines might not be who they said they were.

Owl began surveilling the gallerist, at times closely, other times backing off to avoid spooking her. Investigators opened their mail, hacked into their phones and discreetly trailed their car along Ljubljana’s cobblestone streets and past riverside cafes. The agency cross-checked information with Interpol and the CIA, eventually uncovering the real names, Anna and Artem Dultsev. Slowly, the couple’s mission revealed itself.

She was surveilling the director of an EU energy regulatory agency based in Slovenia, as it tried to rapidly wean the continent off Russian gas and help Ukraine avoid blackouts.

On trips across the visa-free Schengen bloc and London—for art exhibitions, ostensibly—Anna would meet sources. When she returned she’d ferry handwritten messages using an unhackable technique from the Cold War, placing them under a designated rock in a forest near the coast.

Owl would never know the full picture of what she was up to—but by Dec. 5, 2022, it was ready to strike.

The arrest would have to unfold without word reaching a single friend or neighbor of the couple, or any Russian sympathizer. Not even the U.S. ambassador was told more than she needed to know, as the local CIA station chief shuttled back and forth to meet the tiny set of Slovenians organizing the raid. 

A cold fog was settling on Ljubljana, Christmas markets just opening their shutters, as a string of unmarked vehicles wove toward 35 Primožičeva Street where the Dultsevs were shepherding their children off to school. Kadivnik was watching in real-time on a feed filmed by some of his officers. He would extend the couple one courtesy before arresting them: Neither their daughter Sophie nor son Daniel would be home to watch their parents taken.

At 9:03 he gave the order and special forces burst through the windows so suddenly that Artem, hunched over a laptop, fell backward off his chair. He’d had no time to close the tabs on his screen, or shutter its secure communication to the SVR, which was still running. Screaming echoed through the home, as officers thundered upstairs, shouting “get down!” and bundling Anna onto the floor. She began to cry, claiming an injury, before returning to her feet, standing in silence. The arrest lasted only minutes and the couple left in handcuffs, their breakfast uneaten on the kitchen table.

Neighbors watched through their blinds, late into the night, as detectives searched the home and its yard, leaving with bags of money found in a secret compartment of the refrigerator, documents that included Anna’s forged Greek birth certificate, dozens of USB devices equipped with technology police had never seen before and Artem’s laptop, later sent to Washington for analysis.

Kadivnik delivered word to the CIA that the operation was complete. After nine months of high-strung policework, Slovenia had nabbed the first deep-cover spies in its history.

The Trade

Three months later, in March 2023, Kadivnik slipped into a government building in Belgrade—neutral Serbian territory—to face the Kremlin’s top negotiator for prisoner swaps. The power imbalance was palpable.

Col. Gen. Sergei Beseda was known to some in Russia House as “the Baron” for his tailored suits and a cigar habit hinting at a youth as a KGB officer in Havana. He was wanted in Ukraine for allegedly encouraging former President Viktor Yanukovych to mow down demonstrators before he was toppled.

Now he was seated opposite Kadivnik with a question for Slovenia, a tiny state that won independence from communist Yugoslavia in the 1990s: Why are you doing America’s bidding? Most of all, he was there to deliver a direct message from the Russian president. Putin wanted his spies back.

On the phone with CIA Director Bill Burns, Kadivnik was nervous over what he was supposed to do with two elite Russian agents. Putin’s oldest ally, archhawk Nikolai Patrushev, had called to propose trading them for Slovenians in Russian prisons, but when Slovenia’s national security adviser insisted there were no Slovenians jailed in Russia, Patrushev paused then asked, menacingly: “Are you sure?”

The small country would have to be patient. All through 2023 and into 2024, Moscow and Washington haggled over which prisoners to trade. Poland held off bringing González’s case to a trial that, once it began, would make it harder to swap him.

The Dultsev children remained unaware their parents were charged with being spies, living in foster care, overseen by a female deputy Kadivnik appointed. Anna and Artem were allowed to speak to their children daily. But they begged prison guards to still call them Maria and Ludwig when their children came to visit. Watching the married spies, the Owl chief could tell that she was the more senior officer. 

By July, President Biden was facing pressure to step down as his party’s presidential nominee. That month, Kadivnik got a call from the Slovenian prime minister’s office: a deal was coming together. The FSB and the CIA had inked an agreement at a clandestine meeting in Riyadh. The trade would take place on Aug. 1.

Russia would free a mix of dissidents, German prisoners, and three Americans: former Marine Paul Whelan and journalists Alsu Kurmasheva and the Journal’s Evan Gershkovich, sentenced to a combined 40 years on national-security charges they and the U.S. government denied. Washington and its allies would release eight Russians, including one held for ammunition smuggling, two convicted cybercriminals, and a hit man serving a life sentence for murdering an enemy of Putin in a Berlin park. The rest were Boots and Slippers.

At a July NATO summit in Washington, Biden’s national security adviser asked the Slovenians how the U.S. could thank the small country for its efforts. Slovenia wanted to build new nuclear plants. Could the U.S. help? Weeks later, Biden welcomed the Slovenians to the White House, where they discussed what Westinghouse Electric could do.

The plane that came to collect the Dultsevs from Ljubljana was a U.S. government jet. Kadivnik and a CIA officer would escort the family all the way to the exchange point in Turkey, and then, once they were rid of the spies, pop open a celebratory bottle of bourbon for their trip home.

Eleven-year-old Sophie spent the journey tapping away on a tablet. Her mother looked at her. At some point, during their flight to Moscow she would have to tell her children the truth: Her name was Anna Dultseva, a citizen of Russia, the country she had quietly served for almost half her life as a deep cover spy.

Kate Vtorygina, Novica Mihajlović, Marcos García Rey, Silvina Frydlewsky, Joel Schectman, Karolina Jeznach and James Marson contributed to this article.

Posing as Argentine immigrants in Slovenia, the quiet married couple were in fact part of Putin’s aggressive effort to seed the West with ‘illegal’ intelligence operatives, say authorities

By Georgi Kantchev, Joe Parkinson and Silvina Frydlewsky

LJUBLJANA, Slovenia—The young Argentine couple in the pastel-colored house lived a seemingly ordinary suburban life, driving around this sleepy European capital in a white Kia Ceed sedan, always paying their taxes on time and never so much as getting a parking ticket.

Maria Rosa Mayer Muños ran an online art gallery, telling acquaintances she’d left Argentina after being robbed in Buenos Aires by an armed gang at a red light. Her husband, Ludwig Gisch, ran an IT startup. Described by neighbors in their middle-class district of Črnuče as “normal” and “quiet,” the husband and wife appeared to be global citizens: switching from English and German with friends to accentless Spanish with their son and daughter, who attended the British International School.

Yet almost everything about the family from number 35 Primožičeva street was a carefully constructed lie, according to Slovenian and Western intelligence officials. Gisch’s real name is Artem Viktorovich Dultsev, born in the Russian autonomous republic of Bashkortostan and an elite officer in Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, according to the officials and court documents.

Mayer Muños is Anna Valerevna Dultseva, a more senior SVR officer than her partner, from Nizhny Novgorod. The couple’s computers contained hardware to communicate securely to handlers in Moscow that was so encrypted neither Slovenian nor U.S. technicians could crack it. In a secret compartment inside their refrigerator, they kept hundreds of thousands of euros in crisp bank notes.

Now, a classified trial is expected to deliver its first judgment in the coming weeks on the couple charged with conducting espionage as “illegals,” or deep-penetration agents—two crucial cogs in Vladimir Putin’s fast-expanding shadow war with the West.

Officials say that before they were arrested in December 2022, the pair used Slovenia, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization and European Union member state of just two million people, as a base to travel to nearby Italy, Croatia and across Europe to pay sources and communicate orders from Moscow. The bucolic Alpine country of lakes and mountains—and birthplace of Melania Trump—was a perfect choice to conduct operations, with visa-free access across much of Europe and a limited counterintelligence capacity. They had even trained their two young children, Slovenian officials say, telling them that one day their mom and dad may be captured. 

Shortly after Mayer Muños and Gisch were arrested in a dawn raid by Slovenia’s security services, another pair of suspected Russian illegals—a woman and man carrying Greek and Brazilian passports—abruptly left their lives in Athens and Rio de Janeiro, abandoning businesses and romantic partners who had no idea of their real identity.

The pair carried passports identifying them as Maria Tsalla and Ludwig Campos Wittich. In fact, they were married Russian intelligence officers still building out their legend—a spy’s fake background story—separately in Greece and Brazil, a process Western intelligence agencies estimate costs millions of dollars per person. They were called back to Moscow by handlers fearing the collapse of a network after the Slovenia arrests, officials said.

Other suspected Russian illegals have been exposed across Europe since the Ukraine invasion, from the Netherlands and Norway to the Czech Republic and Bulgaria—the biggest unmasking of deep-penetration agents since the FBI’s 2010 “Operation Ghost Stories” that nabbed 10 Russian spies in America.

Now locked in a Slovenian prison, their children housed with a foster family, the faux-Argentine couple is also a possible component in any prisoner swaps agreed with Russia, including those that may involve jailed Americans Paul Whelan and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, according to senior Slovenian and U.S. officials. The Kremlin has already expressed interest in getting them back in talks handled by Putin’s longtime close ally, Nikolai Patrushev, according to people familiar with the situation.

Neither the Kremlin nor the SVR responded to requests for comment.

The case—being investigated by Slovenian and Western officials at the highest levels of secrecy, with the court proceedings and all materials highly classified—reveals a rare insight into one of the most secretive and prized parts of Russia’s spy machine.

Unlike most spies, illegals don’t pose as diplomats but usually as people unconnected to Russia. They spend years burrowing themselves deep into their target region, creating a spider web of information sources, identifying candidates for recruitment—“talent spotting”—and taking on assignments as a cutout for spies under diplomatic cover, who tend to be under close surveillance by their host countries.

Created in the early days of the Soviet Union and dramatized in the TV show “The Americans,” a previous generation of Russian illegals in the 1940s had played a key role in stealing American atomic secrets. Stalin, who saw the illegals as a crucial tool for influencing the policies of adversaries and gathering intelligence on potential threats, created specialized training programs and deployed them in strategic Western capitals. 

The program has been reinvigorated by Putin, who allegedly worked with illegals during his time as a KGB officer in East Germany and has sung patriotic Soviet songs with agents caught in the U.S. and returned to Moscow in prisoner swaps. “These are special people, of special quality, of special convictions, of a special character,” he said about illegal spies in a 2017 interview with state television.

It is highly likely that Putin receives personal briefings on illegals’ exploits around the world, said Dan Hoffman, a former CIA station chief in Moscow.

In the “Operation Ghost Stories” case, the FBI said Russian illegals spent years establishing a seemingly normal existence in the U.S.: They married, bought homes, raised families, and integrated into American society. One of them studied at Harvard and another earned two master’s degrees from Seton Hall University. Two others worked in real estate.

But beneath the surface, they were actively gathering intelligence and transmitting it back to Moscow, while also seeking individuals who could be recruited as future agents. One of them infiltrated a well-connected consulting firm with offices in Manhattan and Washington, D.C., by working as the company’s in-house computer expert, the Journal has reported. Others were even cultivating their own American-born or -raised children as agents with even deeper cover that would be more likely to pass a U.S. government background check.  

Deep-cover agents face greater risks than embassy-based operatives who work with the protection of diplomatic immunity and are often discreetly deported if caught. Illegals are likely to be handed lengthy prison sentences, meaning a yearslong wait to be released or exchanged in a prisoner swap.

These shapeshifting spies are now becoming a more important tool for the Kremlin after some 700 suspected Russian intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover were expelled worldwide in the aftermath of the Ukraine invasion. The Czech government recently proposed that all Russian embassy workers in the EU should be restricted from moving freely inside the border-free travel zone in Europe, which would make it more difficult for spies under diplomatic cover to liaise with illegals abroad.

NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg said on Thursday that plans were being drawn up to tighten restrictions on the movement of Russian intelligence personnel in Europe.    

“Illegals are again growing in significance for Moscow, especially as the line between espionage and war is becoming almost nonexistent,” said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian security expert who has spent years studying Moscow’s spy networks.

Slovenian officials said that they suspect that an unusual influx of Russian students enrolling in the country’s universities in the past two years, many of whom are in their 40s and 50s, could be cover for more Russian agents. In March, the government deported at least eight Russian students for disseminating pro-Kremlin propaganda and impersonating Slovenians online, according to Slovenian security officials.

The same month a Russian military attaché Sergei Lemeshev was declared persona non grata after he was discovered running a disinformation operation that involved paying “hundreds of sources” to publish pro-Moscow talking points. 

To untangle the truth about the quiet couple who immersed themselves in new roles as an ordinary expat family while leading double lives as Russian spies, the Journal talked to their friends and neighbors; Slovenian, Western and Latin American officials; and reviewed hundreds of sealed documents, including birth and marriage certificates, flight records, Interpol notices and Argentine court records. Along the way reporters found a complex web of lies, from fraudulent documents to the theft of an identity of an infant who died in a small Greek village more than 30 years ago.

“We know they were important, serious agents,” said Vojko Volk, Slovenia’s state secretary for international affairs and national and international security. “It’s like ‘The Americans,’ except in Slovenia.”

Building a legend

The cover story begins with a 2012 bus journey across Uruguay’s border with Argentina, where the couple began a decadelong effort to build an entirely false identity. 

A cache of sealed Argentine court documents shows Gisch entering the country on a tourist visa from Uruguay and Mayer Muños arriving shortly after from Mexico. The couple then almost immediately began gathering documents—many of them fraudulent—to obtain citizenship. Gisch claimed he was an Austrian citizen born in Namibia to an Argentine mother, which gave him a fast track toward citizenship. Mayer Muños claimed she was Mexican and submitted a birth certificate saying she was born in Greece.

The couple moved to the Argentine capital and began building out their legend: living in the middle class neighborhood of Belgrano and attracting little attention among the 146 apartments in their building. Mayer Muños attended a public relations class, graduating with top grades. Gisch opened accounts with Banco Galicia and Banco Macro. Neighbors and locals described them as a shy couple who didn’t attend the building’s tenant meetings. The concierge saw them come and go at routine times, with Gisch often wearing a tie. In 2012, Gisch applied for Argentine citizenship, with Mayer Muños applying a year later. In 2013, the couple welcomed a daughter, Sophie.

“They were very polite, respectful,” said the owner of a nearby deli, Jamonería del Virrey, where the couple would buy raw ham and cheese. “They always paid in cash.”

Mayer Muños was granted citizenship in November 2014 and a son, Daniel arrived the following August.

A month later, the couple married in their local registry office in a small ceremony witnessed by two Colombian citizens. Gisch was listed as a merchant, Mayer Muños as an events organizer.

Slovenian officials and Argentine court and Interpol documents reviewed by the Journal show the couple’s names were Artem Dultsev and Anna Dultseva, suggesting they had married in Russia before they arrived in Argentina. Illegals are often sent abroad as couples, sometimes after an arranged marriage during their training in Russia, espionage experts say. 

A year after their Argentine nuptials, an amendment was made in the marriage certificate, changing Mayer Muños’ mother’s nationality from Austrian to Mexican. The family were set to move to Europe, where background checks by Austria’s government could reveal a hole in their story.

As they prepared to leave, Gisch drained his Banco Galicia account, the final statement showing a balance of 18,784 Argentine pesos, only $21.    

The family landed in Slovenia—a country roughly the size of New Jersey—on tourist visas in the summer of 2017, for the next act of their double lives, this time in the European Union.

Gisch established DSM&IT, an online IT business selling domain names and cloud hosting. The company had three followers on X, including the account of his wife’s business, Art Gallery 5’14, an online company buying and selling mostly modern art. The gallery claimed to work with 90 artists and had prolific social-media accounts posting images almost daily. Gisch would ride his bike the short distance from the Črnuče neighborhood into downtown Ljubljana, while his wife would drive the family car.  

In 2019 they received Slovenian residence permits, putting them on a path to citizenship.  

Mayer Muños was using Ljubljana as a base to travel across Europe, posting pictures of art fairs and exhibitions in places like Zagreb and Edinburgh. A photo from the 2019 Art Fair Zagreb shows her adjusting paintings next to a step ladder, her face not visible.

In 2020, the 5’14 gallery organized an online photo competition, Life in Quarantine, with a €500 cash award. None of the hundreds of photos shared on their social-media accounts showed a clear picture of Mayer Muños or Gisch, but one image posted on Facebook in December 2020, the height of the pandemic, appears to be taken at the front gate of the family home, showing four face masks dangling from a washing line.   

“She was always in a good mood and joyful, and had lots of fun together with other artists,” said Marko Milić, a fine art photographer from Croatia who had met Mayer Muños at a Zagreb art fair.

Both companies appeared designed to attract little attention. They were registered in a nondescript building on Ljubljana’s outskirts along with dozens of other foreign companies such as translators, accountants and financial advisers.

The couple filed annual tax returns and paid promptly, according to Slovenian corporate records. Art Gallery 5’14 claimed in 2021 to have €25,220 in revenues, while the IT company reported €43,785. Neither received public funding or had dealings with entities within tax havens, which could have raised suspicions of Slovenian authorities. 

At their two-story home, the couple spoke Spanish with their son and daughter, neighbors said. Majda Kvas, 93 years old, said she never saw any visitors, but remembers them having at least two family picnics in the garden. “They kept to themselves,” she said. “They were quiet, they wouldn’t even say hello.”

They weren’t quiet enough.

On Feb. 24, 2022—the same day that Putin began his invasion of Ukraine—the couple were back in Argentina, applying for an express processing of a new, or clean, passport, before immediately returning to Slovenia via Frankfurt. 

A few months later, Slovenia’s spy agency, SOVA, or “Owl,” got a tip from an allied agency: They should look into Gisch and Mayer Muños.

‘A puzzle’

Slovenia’s top security officials called allies, who began working in a multinational cell to retrace their movements in Ljubljana, Buenos Aires and across Europe. “We worked together in the utmost secrecy,” said Volk, the state secretary. “It was a puzzle.”

Investigators set up wiretaps, collecting text messages and other data from the couple, which showed them meeting sources in European countries. Slovenian officials could see their companies were fronts, financed by cash collected from their handlers and money from prepaid cards as well as transactions between the two firms to give the impression of cash flow.

In Argentina, police visited the town Gisch had listed on his passport application and found he had never lived there. At the addresses given by the Colombians who witnessed the couple’s wedding, nobody had heard of them. Slovenia requested the fingerprints of Artem Dultsev and Anna Dultseva from Interpol, then sent them to Argentina to compare with Gisch and Mayer Muños. They matched.

More concerning was that the couple had also begun spying in Slovenia: targeting the Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators, or ACER, the only significant EU body based in Ljubljana which coordinates regulatory actions among the bloc on electricity and natural gas. The agency, whose headquarters is located around five miles from the couple’s home, raised its profile after the Ukraine invasion as energy became an especially acute topic for the continent and Russia used its gas supply to squeeze European industry. ACER didn’t respond to a request for comment. 

The Slovenians and their allies realized the couple were no longer just creating their back story. “They had been awoken,” Volk said.

On Dec. 5, 2022, masked police in tactical gear arrived after midnight, jumped the family’s fence and positioned themselves outside the windows. When the couple raised the shutters, the officers burst in and arrested them. Gisch and Mayer Muños refused to divulge any information to the investigators after their arrest, according to a former official. Their two children—now aged 8 and 11, according to the Argentine court documents—were placed in the care of the state and moved to another school. They are allowed regular visits to their parents in prison.

Shortly after the arrest, Russia established contact, acknowledging the couple worked for the SVR and saying it wanted them back. Slovenia was eager to quickly trade and to avoid antagonizing the Kremlin, but a deal couldn’t be reached. Slovenian officials had “prayed to get rid of them,” one senior official said.

Mayer Muños and Gisch refused to talk, but Slovenia and its allies were learning more about their activities and other potentially connected agents. When Maria Tsalla fled Greece shortly after the arrests, Greek authorities discovered she had registered her birth on the island of Evia, claiming the identity of an infant who was listed as dying in 1991. Authorities could see the handwritten registry had been altered—a clue to her deception—and that Tsalla had been trying to replace it with a new registration in the Athens suburb of Marousi, one of the first municipalities to digitize records.

Tsalla left behind a boyfriend in Athens who allegedly had no idea she wasn’t from Greece. Greek authorities discovered she was in fact married to another Russian illegal, Campos Wittich, who had lived for some two years in Rio de Janeiro with his Brazilian girlfriend—a veterinarian who worked for the country’s ministry of agriculture. She helped coordinate the social media search for him when he disappeared—only to learn that he was working undercover for Russian intelligence.

Gisch and Mayer Muños have now served more than 18 months in a Slovenian prison. Slovenia’s espionage laws allow for a maximum eight-year sentence, and officials say the couple could be freed after four for good behavior.

“They were long-term illegals,” said Janez Stusek, SOVA chief until the middle of 2022, several months before the couple’s arrest. “They had a long-term mission trying to infiltrate Slovenia as an entering point into Europe.”

On 35 Primožičeva street, a new couple has moved in. Two bikes are parked on the porch and two children’s badminton rackets are hung on the veranda. Efforts to reach them were unsuccessful, and the owners of the house declined to comment. The new couple, officials and neighbors said, are also Russian.

Novica Mihajlovic and Yannis Palaiologos contributed to this article.

Over six years, the Russian leader stockpiled American detainees, enhancing his bargaining position and thwarting backchannel efforts by Trump and Biden to bring citizens home

By Aruna Viswanatha, Bojan Pancevski, Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson

There were no aides and no note-takers in the Oval Office—just President Biden and his German guest.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz came on such short notice that the only plane he could book, a small Airbus 321, had to refuel in Iceland. Russia’s war in Ukraine and the fighting in Gaza dominated the 90-minute meeting.

There was one last secret item on the agenda: Were Germany and America willing to conduct one of the most complex prisoner trades with the Kremlin since the Cold War?

Washington wanted Vladimir Putin to send home two Americans it deemed unlawfully jailed in Russia, former Marine Paul Whelan and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who will mark a year in captivity on Friday. Putin wanted Berlin to release Vadim Krasikov, a Russian hit man serving a life sentence in Germany for murder.

It would be a tough thing for the U.S. ally to deliver, but perhaps it could be sold to the German public if Russia agreed to free its most prominent dissident,  Alexei Navalny, who was imprisoned in an Arctic gulag.

Both administrations agreed to explore the idea further.

The White House never had a chance to make a formal proposal to Moscow. Word of the discussions reached the Kremlin via a private intermediary, according to people familiar with the matter. On Feb. 16, one week after the Oval Office meeting, Navalny died suddenly of unknown causes.

“Such is life,” the Russian president told reporters the night after his re-election.

It was the most shocking of a series of setbacks in secret prisoner talks between Washington and Moscow that have now bedeviled two U.S. presidencies. 

America once had only one prisoner it considered wrongfully jailed in Russia, the 54-year-old Whelan. But through nearly six years of intense and combative negotiations, Putin has run up the score, stockpiling his prisons with Americans to swap for the very few Russians abroad he cares to bring back.

Both Presidents Biden and Trump found themselves facing the crude asymmetry between the U.S. and Russia, whose leader of a quarter-century can order foreigners plucked from their hotel rooms and sentenced to decades on spurious charges.

Putin, whom Biden called “a butcher,” hasn’t been a normal negotiating partner. After news of Navalny’s sudden death interrupted an annual lunch among chiefs of the leading Western security agencies, several attendees immediately wondered if the Russian ruler had ordered a hit. Weeks later, the U.S. hasn’t offered a public assessment of how he died, while Russia has cited only “natural causes.”

At the same time, America has been an easy mark, polarized by its culture wars and susceptible to the power of celebrity-driven campaigns that leveled a degree of pressure on the White House never felt by the Kremlin.

The Biden administration came into office determined to craft a consistent approach to prisoner talks—only to be knocked off course by viral outrage when Russia jailed Olympic basketball champion Brittney Griner. As her representatives lobbied the president to free her, if necessary by trading notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, the Justice Department was concerned such a deal would make it harder to free Whelan and encourage Putin to grab more Americans.

The unreported story of this escalating hostage crisis takes place in clandestine meetings in hotels in neutral capitals booked under false names. The Journal spoke to dozens of current or former U.S., European, Middle Eastern and Russian officials, including individuals directly involved in negotiations. It also reviewed court records and interviewed former prisoners, their families and the people who worked as their backchannel representatives.

The drama features walk-on roles by Hillary Clinton, media personality Tucker Carlson and former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who became involved in the negotiations only to die before Whelan, now closing in on his 2,000th day in prison, could come home.

As of today, the U.S. doesn’t have any Russians in its prison system of the category the Kremlin wants in return for the Americans it has jailed. Washington has been reduced to hoping foreign governments might be willing to trade Russians they hold on espionage or murder charges.

“Putin will take more and more Americans,” said Fiona Hill, who sat across the table from Russia’s president as the top Russia adviser for President Trump. “He has figured out he can exploit our domestic preoccupations and anxieties.” 

‘I’m a Marine, I’m tough’

The first time the name “Paul Whelan” landed in the American Embassy in Moscow, nobody knew who he was—just that he had been grabbed in a raid on his hotel room during the Christmas holidays of 2018.

In the compound’s safe room, combed daily for surveillance equipment, Ambassador Jon Huntsman was asking the CIA station chief the same question he’d asked other diplomatic staff: Who was this Michigan bachelor, repeatedly traveling to Moscow as a tourist on an ordinary visa?

The station chief was as befuddled as the ambassador, and replied that Whelan wasn’t working for the CIA. The two contacted the White House, where officials determined he’d been set up.

Held in Moscow’s infamous Lefortovo Prison, Whelan told his lawyer he’d been handed a thumbdrive by a friend, then almost immediately arrested by agents of Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB. One of them had passed on a reassuring message: You’ll be traded.

Days later, Huntsman arrived to meet him. Whelan was being kept in a complex of roughly 9-by-12-foot cells where lights were turned brighter through the night. Inmates’ sole windows were a slice of translucent glass, so high above eye level that when morning broke, they could only see the gray Moscow sky.

“I’m a Marine, I’m tough,” Whelan told the ambassador. “I can get through this.”

Days later, Huntsman bypassed Russia’s Foreign Ministry to talk directly to Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s chief foreign-policy adviser. With a direct line to Putin, Ushakov could get things done.

Their meeting, in an office next to the Kremlin, was to the point. A Russian activist named Maria Butina had pleaded guilty two weeks before Whelan’s arrest to being part of a conspiracy to influence U.S. politics by becoming involved with conservative groups including the National Rifle Association at the direction of a top official from Russia’s central bank. Russia would be willing to trade her for Whelan. Or it could trade him for a pilot, Konstantin Yaroshenko, sentenced to 20 years for drug smuggling.

“Put a deal on the table and let’s talk,” said Ushakov, who would interrupt meetings to take a call from the president he called “the boss.”

There was another prisoner the Kremlin wanted more: Viktor Bout, the Russian arms trafficker loosely fictionalized by Nicolas Cage in the blockbuster “Lord of War.” America’s Drug Enforcement Administration had busted him in Thailand in a 2008 sting operation. Russian diplomats had ritualistically invoked Bout in almost every meeting since, calling him a victim of America’s overreach as a global policeman.

Yaroshenko, grabbed by the DEA in Liberia in 2010, was another American kidnapping on foreign soil, they insisted. Their complaints fell flat with the Obama administration and with Trump.

Huntsman headed to the White House and pressed Trump for a quick deal. “We’ve got to get this done,” the president said.

But Trump sounded a more skeptical tone to Russia specialists in his administration. The president and his national security team feared Putin would sense weakness if the U.S. started eagerly petitioning for Whelan’s release.

The proposition of swapping Whelan for Butina or Yaroshenko never gained momentum. Trading Bout sounded so lopsided that Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, dismissed it outright: “There’s no way we’re going to agree to this,” he said he told his staff. 

In April 2019, the U.S. lost a card in its hand: A federal judge sentenced Butina to just 18 months in prison. Anatoly Antonov, Russia’s ambassador to Washington, teased U.S. officials that the short sentence had made it easy: Rather than trade Butina, Moscow was now inclined to let her jail time run out.

In August, the score shifted again. Police in Russia arrested another former Marine, Trevor Reed, during a drunken night out with his Russian girlfriend. They had been preparing to release him when two counterintelligence officers walked into the station. Reed, who had served at Camp David when Biden was vice president, found himself facing a nine-year sentence for assaulting a police officer. He denied the charge and said Russian law enforcement provided no credible evidence. The State Department declared him wrongfully detained.

The next month, the House of Representatives began an impeachment inquiry into President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, removing any political room for swapping prisoners with the Kremlin. “Everything involving Russia basically became radioactive,” one senior official said. In October, Huntsman, the ambassador who had championed Whelan’s cause, resigned.

The best the U.S. could do was a complex exchange of medical care, partially arranged by former Gov. Richardson, who, over the course of nearly a year, got the Justice Department to persuade the warden of Yaroshenko’s federal penitentiary to permit an outside dentist to treat the inmate’s toothache.

The Kremlin allowed Whelan to see a hernia specialist at a Moscow clinic. Richardson hoped this was building momentum, but in June 2020, a Moscow judge handed Whelan a 16-year sentence. Standing in a glass defendants’ cage and struggling to understand the untranslated Russian, Whelan held up a handwritten note: “SHAM TRIAL!”

Days in IK-17, his new home—a maze of low-slung cell blocks wreathed in razor wire some 300 miles east of Moscow began with the Russian national anthem blaring from tinny loudspeakers, its melody the same as in Soviet times. On the prison floor, Whelan was ordered to stitch pants and coats in a sea of inmates in black uniforms huddled over sewing desks for Technoavia, Russia’s industrial-clothing corporation. Food was scarce and fights were frequent in the labor camp sardonically nicknamed “Fashion Colony.”

When the new U.S. ambassador, John Sullivan, visited him, Whelan was eager to share historical trivia on the prison: It had once held German prisoners of war during its days as a Stalinist gulag. Whelan was keeping a small notebook where he meticulously recorded the slights prison guards meted out to him.

Bout, meanwhile, was teaching yoga to inmates in a medium-security Illinois prison. In the mornings, he read the Journal, English being one of at least five languages he spoke—six, counting Esperanto. At times, he dreamed about once again tasting fresh garlic and grapes. Frequent visits from Russian diplomats stopped after Washington restricted their movements, but there was hope for Bout, relayed to him in regular phone calls: In all likelihood, he would be traded for Whelan.

That idea was going nowhere inside the Trump White House. New national security adviser Robert O’Brien vowed there would be “no more ransoms.” Instead, he tried to shake Whelan and Reed free at the end of a meeting with Putin’s most important official, national security chief and former FSB director Nikolai Patrushev.

The two led delegations to Geneva, barely five weeks before the 2020 election, to negotiate an extension to a nuclear arms control treaty. Russia also wanted to restart conversations on cybersecurity and counterterrorism. In return, O’Brien asked, could Russia release Whelan and Reed as a gesture of goodwill?

Patrushev offered a loose handshake agreement O’Brien understood as a yes, a fleeting diplomatic win the same day the campaigning president Trump was hospitalized with Covid-19. The State Department was skeptical Patrushev had committed Russia to anything more conclusive than a maybe.

A month later, Trump lost re-election. In his final days in office, O’Brien pinged the Russians again, but they never responded.

“We were aware the Russians were saying nyet. And everything gets frozen,” one official said.

The backchannel

Six months later, America’s new president met Putin in a mansion by Lake Geneva, the choreography echoing the city’s famous Reagan-Gorbachev peace summit. Biden wanted a “stable and predictable relationship with Russia,” and agreed to establish a backchannel to discuss prisoner exchanges.

Russian and U.S. intelligence officials arrived for the first backchannel talks at a European hotel, where a conference room had been booked to disguise its true purpose. The U.S. delegation had come reluctantly, leaving phones behind, wary of the prisoner trades they were sent to explore.

The interlocutor studying the Americans from across the table suggested Russia’s appetite for a deal was souring. When it came to Whelan, Russia had a grim new demand: a spy for a spy. If Washington wanted Moscow to free an American convicted in a Russian court of espionage, the U.S. would have to secure the release of a Russian sentenced for an equivalent crime. And the U.S., he added, didn’t have such a convict anywhere in its prison system.

There was, however, one Russian that Putin was starting to ask about: Vadim Krasikov, the former FSB officer serving a murder sentence in Germany. The two were so close the hit man had once bragged about passing time with the president at an elite military training facility: Putin, the erstwhile chief of the FSB, “shoots well,” he’d told friends.

The price for Whelan, after two years in jail, was ratcheting up again.

In the weeks that followed, U.S. officials watched as police at Russian airports and elsewhere began scooping up more Americans. In August, customs officers arrested Marc Fogel, a history teacher at the Moscow high school U.S. Embassy children attend, for carrying less than an ounce of medical marijuana.

David Barnes flew to Russia to find his two sons his ex-wife had taken there, only to be sentenced to 21 years for child abuse charges that he denied and which Texas authorities didn’t find evidence to support. Around the same time, Sarah Krivanek, an American teaching English in Russia was arrested for assault after injuring the male Russian roommate she said had been drunkenly beating her.

None of those cases registered with the American public or with officials—Krivanek says no diplomat ever visited her in jail.

But on Feb. 17, Russian customs agents finally seized someone whose ordeal would resonate.

A basketball star

The authorities at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport had installed three new color security cameras, perfectly aligned to record cinematic details as Brittney Griner, a two-time basketball Olympic gold medalist, lifted her black rucksack onto a customs table, en route to play with her offseason team UMMC Ekaterinburg. Inside were vape cartridges containing less than a gram of medically prescribed hash oil, illegal in Russia.

News of her arrest became fodder for America’s gathering culture wars: a Black lesbian sports star had been imprisoned by a regime with draconian laws on LGBTQ rights. In the ensuing months, Hollywood and sports celebrities including LeBron James, Kerry Washington and Amy Schumer joined an exploding social-media campaign: #WeAreBG.

“Brittney Griner is Trapped and Alone,” read an opinion headline in the New York Times. “Where’s Your Outrage?”

While other Americans had struggled to get government attention, the crash team including executives and sports agents working to free Griner could immediately reach the heart of the White House; one had served in the Clinton administration with Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Russian officials realized they had leverage and floated a possible deal: Bout and Yaroshenko for Griner and Trevor Reed, the former White House Marine who had served at Camp David during Biden’s vice presidency. Biden was also under pressure to free Reed: “Trevor had been willing to die for you,” his father, Joey Reed, told the president during a meeting in March.

Joey Reed says his son’s yearslong detention left him shocked at the inability of the U.S. government, under both parties, to negotiate with Moscow: “I don’t think they generally know how to work these kinds of deals,” he said. Putin, he added, has managed to outfox Washington for 24 years: “They know our government better than we know our government.”

Biden approved an exchange of Yaroshenko for Reed. On April 27, 2022, the former Marine was flown to a Turkish airport. As he walked out onto the tarmac, and into an American jet, he asked the U.S. delegation escorting him on board: “Where’s Paul?”

Whelan, still sewing coats in IK-17 prison, had become the subject of a difficult moral calculus. The U.S. wanted to trade Bout for both Griner and Whelan, arguing the world’s most famous gunrunner was surely worth a basketball center caught with hash oil and an obscure former Marine. Russia, watching the celebrity-studded campaign to free Griner, proposed to trade both the sports star and Whelan for Krasikov.

U.S. officials protested. The convicted murderer was in a German prison, but the Russians were unmoved. Tell Germany to release Krasikov, the Russians suggested.

Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, notified his German counterpart of the Russian proposal, but the U.S. didn’t submit a formal request for Krasikov. The CIA sent a query down to its station chief in Berlin—who responded that it wouldn’t even be worth asking. For months, the U.S. and Russia waged a stare-down, the Kremlin hoping the U.S. would deliver Krasikov, and the White House hoping to exchange two prisoners for one.

On Sept. 16, Griner’s wife and agent met Biden in the White House and communicated a plea: Don’t let the negotiations needlessly drag out if there is a narrower deal—either for Griner or Whelan—to be had. The president met Whelan’s sister Elizabeth the same day.

The U.S. tried offering Bout for Whelan—hoping to then trade another Russian convicted of a lesser charge for the celebrity athlete—but Moscow stuck to its guns. For Griner, Bout. And if the U.S. wanted Whelan, they could discuss a trade involving Krasikov.

The Whelan family could feel the tide turning against them once more. “Does this mean he is going to be left behind yet again?” his sister Elizabeth had said to the Detroit News.

Justice Department officials were concerned: Trading Griner for Bout would make it harder to free Whelan, they argued, because there were no other inmates left in U.S. prisons that Russia wanted, plus it could make other countries reluctant to extradite criminals to America. The president overrode internal objections. The State Department dispatched an official to tell the Whelan family that Biden had agreed to exchange Bout to bring Griner home.

“Sadly, for totally illegitimate reasons, Russia is treating Paul’s case differently than Brittney’s,” Biden told reporters, after calling the Whelans.

To retrieve Griner, the State Department chartered a private medical jet with trauma specialists on hand to bring her back to the U.S., where she was later honored at the White House.

That same day, the State Department put Krivanek—whose sentence for assaulting her abusive roommate had ended—on a commercial flight and told her she would have to repay nearly $4,000 in traveling expenses. She had been assaulted in a coed prison, she said, her knee and two cervical spine discs fractured, injuries treated when a friend met her at the airport and drove straight to a local emergency room.

Watching from afar, Trump criticized the deal on his social-networking site, TruthSocial. “I would have gotten Paul out,” he wrote.

It was the first time the Whelan family ever saw Trump publicly mention Paul’s name.

The journalist

Putin still didn’t have his hit man back.

Just under two weeks after Griner’s release, the Russian president delivered a video speech to the FSB, admonishing them to find more spies: “You need to significantly improve your work,” he told FSB top brass assembled to celebrate Security Agency Workers’ Day, a Russian holiday.

By the new year, U.S. officials had noticed an uptick in surveillance toward the few Americans still in Russia. Evan Gershkovich had been followed on reporting trips in Moscow and western Russia.

On March 29, he was on another reporting trip, waiting at a steakhouse in Yekaterinburg, when masked agents barged in.

Gershkovich was charged with espionage and jailed alone in a Lefortovo prison cell, prompting a worldwide outcry. The State Department within weeks deemed him unlawfully detained and Biden pledged to push for his freedom.

Putin now had two Americans spuriously classified as spies.

When the news reached Whelan in IK-17, it took him weeks to stabilize. He seemed “rattled like never before” and afraid he’d be overlooked for a third time, his family wrote in an online statement.

Months passed with little movement forward in the negotiations. Weeks after Gershkovich’s arrest, the U.S. offered five people, including cybercriminals, a bid it hoped would open new options to return Gershkovich and Whelan without freeing Krasikov. The Russians waited.

From his cell in Lefortovo, Gershkovich was writing letters to friends and family, asking them to deliver flowers to loved ones and to send him obscure Russian literature.

A more ambitious transnational effort to free them had begun to take shape, initially spearheaded by an unexpected source: Hillary Clinton.

The former secretary of state had accepted a proposal from Christo Grozev, a friend and associate of Navalny, to lobby the White House to include the imprisoned Russian opposition leader in negotiations, handing the Russians Krasikov in exchange.

Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, had been approaching German officials informally, but the government was divided. Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock opposed any deal involving Krasikov, who had gunned down a perceived enemy of the Kremlin in a Berlin park in broad daylight.

And yet Navalny was such a popular figure in Germany that when he was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok in 2020, then-Chancellor Angela Merkel helped arrange for him to be airlifted to Berlin, where doctors saved his life. Scholz, the current chancellor, visited him during his recovery and has spoken about how impressed he was with Navalny’s courage and moral strength.

Spokespeople for Navalny and the German government declined to comment.

Putin, meanwhile, was hinting strongly that he would be open to an exchange that included Gershkovich.

In February, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson arrived in Moscow to interview the Russian leader. Beforehand, Carlson advised the president’s aides that he planned to press Putin to release Gershkovich then and there, so he could personally bring him back to the U.S. An official close to Putin said it would be a “great idea” and could generate a positive response, Carlson told the Journal.

When it came time to spring the question, Putin demurred, although he suggested Gershkovich could be traded for an unnamed prisoner who fit Krasikov’s profile. The Russian leader left Carlson with the sense that he was ambivalent. “Putin basically acknowledged that Gershkovich was held hostage, and my sense was that he was embarrassed about it,” Carlson said.

Momentum appeared to be growing but there was still no final U.S.-German agreement nor any proposal to the Russians. Seven days after Biden met Scholz, Navalny’s closest aides and his wife Yulia arrived at the global gathering of security officials in Munich, where they hoped negotiations could soon reach a breakthrough.

It was not to be. Hours after hearing her husband had died in prison, a tearful Navalnaya held an impromptu speech declaring, “This regime and Vladimir Putin should be held personally responsible.”