There’s claims that some of the people returned to Russia were sleeper agents with kids who did not know.
Link in post to “streetinsider.com” does not work for me
ETA: link works now
https://www.streetinsider.com/dr/news.php?id=23543561&gfv=1
If true, I would think it would be more widely reported.
They posed as Argentinians and spoke Spanish at home. They lived in Argentina before moving to Slovenia.
In interviews with about a dozen people who knew one or both of the couple, two words kept cropping up: “ordinary” and “nice”. Neighbours insisted the people living at No 35 were a run-of-the-mill family, and said the children could often be heard playing in the garden, shrieking in Spanish.
The supposed spies had built a double life in Argentina dating back to 2012. Five years later, they moved to Slovenia as a family with two small children.
ETA:
Peskov confirmed that Artem Dultsev and Anna Dultseva, who had been posing as an Argentine couple in Slovenia, were in fact Russian “illegals” – deep-cover spies who can spend decades abroad pretending to be foreigners. The couple’s two children, who had been taken into foster care when their parents were arrested in late 2022, travelled to Russia with them.
“The children of the illegals who arrived yesterday only found out they were Russian on the plane from Ankara. They do not speak Russian,” Peskov said. Putin greeted them in Spanish with the words “buenas noches” when they disembarked the plane.
Another respected MSM post about it:
What strikes me most is that it’s literally “The Americans” in real life. I haven’t heard anyone draw that parallel, which surprises me.
The Americans was inspired by a network of Russian agents busted in 2010.
I can’t believe the ROI on these types of programs are worth the physical and diplomatic risks.
Yes, and yet no one seems to be talking about it, and apparently the lessons weren’t learned because they’re still doing it, at least elsewhere. Like @bluehenbear, I wonder about the risk/reward for this form of espionage.
Perhaps the difficulty is part of the attraction for the officials in charge. Since it takes years to train a deep cover agent, develop their “legend” and get them into position, nobody can accuse you of doing nothing or wasting your time. You’ll be retired long before the shit hits the fan.
Especially after reading Anne Appelbaum’s new book “Autocracy Inc.” I’m inclined to support a bit of house cleaning when it comes to autocratic influence on our economies.
It certainly is “one of” the countries actively spying in Ireland.
That’s for sure.
This is the first I heard about it.
I imagine it is pretty useful actually? The country sending agents out gets potential contacts and information and then at worst a potential bargaining chip (even as a sacrifice) with little to no promises going the other way. If they don’t get caught you have a kind of subtle influence from a supercharged immigrant that gets to bypass the usual filters and access to whatever eyes-on-the-ground observations they can make about variously guarded networks of people/info.
I guess the thing is because afaik every country has efforts like this somewhere maybe it just isn’t that much of a diplomatic catastrophe when they are caught or even if some one is falsely accused and held.
It’s easy to see why some people would do it too if they had the opportunity. Like I imagine over there people take a kind of pride in knowing that some one breached the social defenses of the world’s uber-elites. Hell, half of us right here in the US couldn’t accomplish the same in our own country no matter how hard we studied… not without a whole government financially supporting us and falsifying documents for us at least!
About that:
Sounds a bit like maybe Scappaticci, after he was burned and in hiding anyway, was the perfect candidate to be “credited” with stuff he didn’t do in addition to all the sick stuff he did do.
But aren’t most Russian illegals living pretty normal lives in suburbia somewhere? They maybe get jobs at companies that have defense contracts but I don’t think I have ever read a story about illegals that actually achieved something that a 50000 dollar bribe of an existing employee wouldn’t have as well.
Do they? I can imagine American illegals in Russian as leftovers from the cold war and active ones in places like Cuba. I’m pretty sure Israel has them in places like Iran and vice versa. Britain probably has some just because they like to imagine themselves to be a big player on the world stage. Apart from that? I’m sure every country has agents in other countries, some on years-long missions. But deep cover illegals? People who dedicate their lives to it?
Depends how “deep” you consider “deep cover”.
