The couple lived with their children in Slovenia as a family who fled Argentina to Europe in search of safety. Now the two adults will be tried as Russian spies.
An Argentine family based in Slovenia is awaiting trial after the elements that make up the couple, Maria Mayer and Ludwig Gisch, were accused of being, after all, Russian spies. They were described in the community where they lived as “good” and “normal” and did not arouse any suspicion. If the accusation is confirmed, the case will be the first to be made public since 2010, the year the US arrested 10 Russian agents.
Neighbors talked about Maria Mayer and Ludwig Gisch almost always in the same way: friendly but not overbearing and curious but not persistent, as The Guardian writes. They arrived in Ljubljana, the Slovenian capital, in 2017 accompanied by their two children. She ran an art gallery and he ran a technology company, and they told their new friends that they had left their home country for safety. They spoke to the children in English and Spanish.
The first reports on the arrests of a couple linked to Russian intelligence appeared in the Slovenian press in January. Now, the Slovenian government itself, through the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Tanja Fajon, has confirmed that the couple was not just any family, but spies. For The Guardian, sources close to the process in Ljubljana even explained that they are elite agents, known as “illegals”. “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 a spokesman for the local police, quoted by the British newspaper.
Slovenian intelligence services, contacted by Reuters, declined to comment, saying the matter is confidential. They reminded the news agency that they constantly share information with all the country’s security forces, as well as with the authorities and services of the European Union and NATO.
According to a source close to the process cited by The Guardian, Moscow not only assumed that the couple were part of its team of agents, but is also trying to negotiate a prisoner exchange to save Maria and Ludwig. If convicted, they face eight years in prison. The children were handed over to an institution, just at the time of the arrest.
With the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, several Western governments expelled hundreds of Russian spies working in Russian embassies under diplomatic cover. Moscow resorts, not infrequently, to “illegal” agents to avoid the strict surveillance that diplomatic officials are subjected to and thus avoid denouncing their sources. These elements are often responsible for payments to other spies. This must have been the role of Maria and Ludwig: The Guardian reports that, in an office of the “couple”, an amount of money so large that it “took hours to count” was discovered.
Source: Observadora
