A couple caught with huge sums of money and a history of extensive European travel are now reportedly pawns in a diplomatic game. A spy game reminiscent of… our own “Maria Tsalla”, who, however, escaped abroad.
Maria Mayer and Ludwig Gisch settled in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana in 2017 with their two young children. People who knew the couple say they were nice and down-to-earth.
Mayer opened an online art gallery, while Gisch ran an IT startup. They told friends that their fear of crime in Argentina, where they lived, had prompted their move to Europe. Peaceful, mountainous Slovenia provided a refreshing change of pace for the family.
In Guardian interviews with around a dozen people who knew one or both of them, two words kept coming up: “regular” and “nice”. Neighbors insisted the people living at No 35 were a family who were not strange and said children were often heard playing in the garden, shouting in Spanish.
“Maria and Ludwig” was in reality elite Russian spies
It therefore came as a shock when, in early December, Mayer and Gisch became target of one of the most secretive and well-coordinated police operations in recent Slovenian history.
The police swarmed the house, arrested the couple and took their two children into social care. Police also raided an office owned by the couple. Among the findings, according to a source with knowledge of the investigation: an “enormous” amount of cash, so much in fact that it took hours to count.
In late January, Slovenian media announced the arrests, linking the pair to Russian intelligence. Sources in Ljubljana told the Guardian this week that “Maria and Ludwig” were in fact elite Russian spies, known as “illegals”.
The arrests were made following a tip from a foreign intelligence service, just as it happened in Greece with the action of the Russian spy, Irina Alexandrovna Smireva, with the pseudonym “Maria Tsalla». The evidence found in their home also revealed the activities of their colleague in Greece.
How the “illegals” operate – The links with the famous Russian SVR
On Thursday, Foreign Minister Tanja Fajon confirmed those claims, telling reporters that the couple arrested were in fact Russian citizens and not Argentines.
Unlike “legitimate” Russian intelligence officers, who are disguised as diplomats in Russian embassies around the world, the “illegals” operate without visible ties to Moscow.
They train for years to pretend to be strangers and then sent abroad to gather intelligence. Many have children who grow up with no idea that their parents are really Russian.
“The suspects are members of a foreign intelligence service, who used illegally obtained foreign identity documents to live and work in Slovenia under false identities and secretly collect information,” said Drago Menegalia, a police spokesman.
Two sources with detailed knowledge of the case said that Mayer and Gisch worked for Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence agency. If the pair are indeed “illegal” SVRs, it will be the first such case to go public since 2010, when the FBI arrested a group of 10 people in the US following a tip from a whistleblower inside Russian intelligence.
A source with knowledge of the behind-the-scenes maneuvering said that in informal talks after the arrests, Moscow had quickly accepted that the pair were intelligence officers. Although preparations are underway for a trial in Slovenia, negotiations are taking place behind the scenes between Moscow and Western countries to exchange them for a person or people currently in prison in Russia, the source said.
Slovenia has a weaker counterintelligence environment than many European countries, but is located within the Schengen free movement zone. So it was the perfect base for the couple to be able to travel most of Europe without border controls. “Most of their activity was not in Slovenia,” said one source.
The large stash of cash found during the investigation could indicate that the pair’s duties included paying Russian informal agents or informants. Moscow sometimes uses illegals for such tasks because intelligence officers working from embassies could be subject to routine surveillance and thus at risk of revealing sources.
The profiles of the two spies – How they went under the “radar”
Mayer’s social media pages show she traveled frequently to promote her gallery. It’s not clear if she was aiming for artistic circles or just using her job as an excuse to travel and serve… other purposes. He visited the Zagreb art fair at least twice and also traveled to Britain on several occasions, where he exhibited works in a gallery inside an Edinburgh shopping centre.
“She was extremely friendly. She put me on her online gallery and also exhibited my work in Edinburgh. This was huge for me, because I rarely have the opportunity to exhibit my work abroad,” said Jure Kralj, a photographer based in the Slovenian city of Maribor.
Other artists described meeting Mayer in Zagreb last November. “We mostly had casual conversations to ‘kill’ time,” recalls an artist from Croatia who attended and exchanged contact information with her.
THE Ludwig Gisch he used an Argentinian passport and according to it he was born in Namibia in 1984. He ran DSM&IT, a company that offers software to organize people’s email inboxes, blocking viruses, malware and spam.
The company’s online footprint is not particularly impressive. The profile his Twitter account has only three followers, one of which is Gisch and another is his wife’s gallery account. A friend of the couple who downloaded the trial version of the software said he doubted anyone would pay for such a service.
See more
“I wasn’t too impressed. It was five years behind current technology in Europe or even anything made in Russia,” the friend said.
Like his wife, he used his job to travel. His social media profiles suggest he attended CloudFest 2022, a conference in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, which bills itself as the “World’s No. 1 Internet Infrastructure Event” and says it attracts thousands of senior executives working on internet security .
