How children of freed spies learned they were Russian on flight to Moscow

The Russian government plane that landed in Moscow from Ankara on Thursday carried an assortment of spies, assassins and criminals, one half of the biggest prisoner exchange since the cold war.

But among the first to descend the stairs to the tarmac, where president Vladimir Putin was waiting to greet the returnees, were two young children, looking wide-eyed and confused.

Sofia, 11, and Daniel, 8, had been born in Argentina. They later moved with their parents, Maria Mayer and Ludwig Gisch, to Slovenia, where Mayer ran an online art gallery and Gisch started an IT company.

Mayer told friends the family had left their home country of Argentina to avoid street crime. The family spoke Spanish at home; the children went to an international school in Ljubljana, where they studied in English.

Now, Sofia and Daniel found themselves on a red carpet at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport, a military guard of honour standing to attention on each side, and face to face with Putin. The Russian president handed Sofia a bouquet of flowers. “Buenas noches,” he said to the child, with a smile.

Later, Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov explained that it was only on the plane from Ankara to Moscow that the parents told their children for the first time that they were not really Argentinians at all. Maria and Ludwig were pseudonyms; their real names were Anna Dultseva and Artem Dultsev, and they were deep-cover “illegals” from Russia’s SVR intelligence agency.

The couple were arrested in December 2022, when the family home in a quiet Ljubljana suburb was raided by armed police after a tip-off from an allied intelligence service. After the arrest of their parents, Sofia and Daniel were taken into foster care, and were not reunited with them until Thursday’s exchange.

When the Guardian visited Slovenia to report on the case last year, none of the family’s friends believed that the polite, ordinary couple with two kids could really have been hiding such a dramatic secret.

A neighbour claimed it had all been invented by lying journalists; a friend said Mayer, who was hugged by Putin as she stepped off the plane on Thursday, had been a “grey mouse” and obviously was not a spy.

Related: The ‘ordinary’ family at No 35: suspected Russian spies await trial in Slovenia

The revelations on the three-hour flight to Moscow must have been a lot to take in: Sofia and Daniel spoke not a word of Russian and knew nothing about the country. Now they were flying there to live, perhaps forever.

After they entered the airport terminal, they asked their parents who the man handing them flowers on the tarmac had been. “They did not even know who Putin was,” said Peskov.

Illegals are Russia’s most prized spies, trained for years to ape the language and mannerisms of foreigners and then dispatched abroad on missions that can last for decades. All spying involves deception, but being an illegal involves deceiving in a particularly visceral and intimate way, with the operatives required to lie to everyone around them for years, including their own children.

Recently, illegals have become a key part of the propaganda of Putin’s regime, with hagiographical television documentaries, carefully edited books relaying their patriotic feats, and even statues to some of the best-known illegals appearing in various Russian cities. This mythmaking has glossed over the trauma inherent in the work, portraying it instead as a glorious sacrifice for the benefit of the motherland.

Peskov explained away the earth-shattering news the Dultsevs had delivered to their children on the plane as an inevitable part of being an illegal, “making such sacrifices for the sake of their work and their dedication to their service”.

The Dultsevs are just the latest in a long line of Soviet and Russian illegals in the century-long history of the programme to go through the messy and painful process of revealing to their children that their whole upbringing has been a lie.

In the case of Canadian-born Tim and Alex Foley, the first time they found out that their parents, Don and Ann, were in fact Andrei and Elena from Siberia was when the FBI came knocking at their house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Tim’s 20th birthday in 2010.

It was only when he arrived in Moscow and was shown old photographs of his parents wearing KGB uniforms that it finally sank in, Alex told the Guardian in 2016. The brothers were stripped of their Canadian citizenship and given Russian passports and new surnames. “In terms of family and keeping this whole thing together, it really doesn’t work out well when you choose this kind of path,” said Tim.

The main question for all illegals who had children was when, if ever, they should reveal the truth. To do so while abroad was an enormous operational risk. What if the children blurted something out to friends or teachers? Many illegals, like the Dultsevs, only revealed their identities to their children once they were already travelling back home at the end of their missions.

A file in an archive of KGB documents smuggled out of Russia recounted the case of an illegal couple who came clean when already on a train from East Berlin to Moscow, at the end of a long assignment in the west. “The boy began crying and lay on the bed, repeating the same thing: that he wants to go home and he won’t go anywhere else,” the file recorded.

Related: The day we discovered our parents were Russian spies

In a rare candid admission, Vladimir Kryuchkov, who was appointed head of the KGB’s foreign intelligence directorate in 1974, conceded that the life of an illegal often led to “sad family situations … and sometimes irreconcilable hatred”.

Sofia and Daniel may be young enough that they can adapt to their new lives in Russia, but it will not be an easy adjustment, and it is unlikely they will ever see any of their friends from Ljubljana again. Already, though, their twisted family situation is being branded in Moscow as something to be proud of – proof of the lengths Russian operatives will go to in the name of patriotism.

“I am so grateful to our country and so grateful to Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin],” said Dultseva, as the whole family appeared on Russian TV on Monday, strolling in the grounds of the SVR headquarters in the suburbs of Moscow.

It was Daniel’s ninth birthday, and the correspondent gave him a toy Cheburashka from the Soviet-era cartoon and asked if they had learned any Russian phrases yet. Their parents looked on, smiling, apparently unconcerned about parading their children on television.

The correspondent reassured viewers that the espionage carried out by the Dultsevs during their years undercover was well worth all the deception: “They are high-class professionals who devoted their whole lives to the motherland, making sacrifices that ordinary people could never understand. They raised their children as Spanish-speaking Catholics. Now they will have to teach them what borscht is.”

The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West by Shaun Walker will be published in April 2025.