Without further ado, let’s look at the pictures first.
Not long ago, President Putin personally picked up a special family at the airport - a couple with their 11-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son.
According to Russian Press Secretary Peskov’s description at the press conference, the child’s parents are Russian agents who have been lurking abroad for a long time.
The agents were so lurking that their children learned for the first time that they were actually Russians after the flight took off.
“Before that, children had no idea of their parents’ real identity or any connection with our country,” Peskov said with a smile.
He went on to describe a warm and slightly embarrassing scene: "You can imagine that when the children stepped off the gangway of the plane, they had not yet learned Russian, and our President Putin greeted them cordially in Spanish - —'buenas noches' (Good evening). "
(Look at the little girl below, facing the kind-faced Putin, she doesn't seem to have recovered, and she looks a little confused and shy)
This scene is exactly part of a recent hostage exchange between Russia and the West.
According to White House National Security Advisor Sullivan, this is the largest and most complex prisoner exchange operation since the end of the Cold War, and the results are hard-won. He also specifically praised Türkiye and Germany for their very active mediation in this regard.
It is obvious that the number of people exchanged this time is not only large, but more importantly, their identities are very unusual.
Let’s first look at the more representative ones in the United States.
Former U.S. Marine Corps officer, Paul Whelan. In December 2018, he ran to Moscow on the pretext of attending a Russian friend's wedding and was arrested in the hotel on the 28th of that month.
A large number of espionage equipment was found in Paul Whelan's luggage. The so-called "recording wedding video" USB flash drive on his body was decrypted and contained a lot of information about Russia's nuclear military projects under construction.
It can also be seen from this that Paul Whelan is definitely a big fish.
The Trump administration at that time was very anxious and spent a lot of effort to get him back.
In 2020, the two countries were already at an almost complete negotiation. The condition given by Russia was to name and demand the return of the "heavyweight" Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, who had been detained by the United States for many years.
You may not know Victor Bute, but everyone is definitely familiar with that Nicolas Cage movie "Lord of War".
This Victor Bute is the prototype of "Lord of War".
Even Victor Bout's famous saying was interpreted in the movie - the largest arms dealer in the world is the President of the United States. He sells more in a day than I sell in a year.
Originally both parties had agreed to exchange Victor Bute for Paul Whelan. Unexpectedly, Trump lost the election and Biden came to power.
Paul Whelan was quickly dumbfounded.
The Democratic government replaced Victor Bout not with him, but with basketball player Brittney Griner.
You must know that Brittany Griner can be regarded as having "political correctness" buffs all over her body. In this regard, Paul Whelan really cannot compare with others.
Brittney Griner is black, female, and a gay drug addict. The reason why Griner was arrested by Russia was because she was found to be carrying marijuana into the country by Russian security personnel at the Moscow airport.
In this way, Paul Whelan went on to spend several years in prison in Russia. It was not until this time that he was finally exchanged.
is similar to Paul Whelan. Although the other Western prisoners who were exchanged were male and female and of different nationalities (from the United States, Germany, Poland, Slovenia and Norway), almost all of them were related to espionage activities.
The people exchanged from Russia are all Russians, but the same thing is that they all face espionage or murder charges.
For example, there is a Russian named Vadim Krasikov (the one in the picture below). He was arrested in Germany in 2019.
According to reports, Vadim Krasikov’s true identity is a colonel in the Russian intelligence service. He is accused of shooting dead a Georgian Chechen in Berlin who was suspected of being involved in a Moscow subway bombing.
In addition to "lone rangers" like Colonel Krasikov, there are also "frontline intelligence workers" who bring their families with them.
This is the family mentioned at the beginning.
The siblings were born in Argentina, and Spanish is their native language.
In November 2017, their family moved to Slovenia, Eastern Europe, where their parents worked in management positions in local computer companies and art galleries.
Before my parents were arrested, this seemed like an ordinary middle-class Argentinian family.
In December 2022, the parents of the siblings were suddenly arrested by the Slovenian police.
Due to the protection of minors and the particularity of the case, the siblings were not told too much about the details.
In a Slovenian prison, their parents are extremely anxious and worried about losing custody of their children.
Fortunately, they caught up with the opportunity of this substitution and the whole family was able to reunite.
The two siblings were arranged to board the plane with their parents.
At this time, they were told that the plane would land in Moscow, the capital of Russia. Their whole family is Russian!
Their parents’ names are not Carlos Muñoz and Maria Muñoz, but Artem Dultsev and Anna Dultseva!
At the airport, President Putin, who came to greet the family, warmly embraced Dulitseva and sent flowers.
had just learned the shocking truth, and then in a strange land, watching their parents excitedly speaking a strange language to a stranger, the two siblings could still remain so calm. This is really quite "Russian".
At this point, I was actually shocked. A spy couple has been lurking as residents of another country for a long time, and they also have an 11-year-old daughter and an 8-year-old son. Their children simply thought that they were natives of the country of their birth and had not even been exposed to Russian.
This... no matter how you look at it, it looks a bit like the plot of an American TV series - "The American Spy"?
If "The Americans" hadn't already concluded its sixth season in 2018, some people would have doubted that this American drama was based on the story of the Dulitsevs.
"American Spy" has a total of six seasons. It tells the story of a KGB family's experience in the seven or eight years from the early 1980s to the signing of the "Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty" in 1987. Although it has a bit of a black Soviet meaning, it is generally very in-depth. of.
In the play, an ordinary American couple disguised as the Soviet KGB have been lurking in Washington, the capital of the United States, for a long time since the late 1960s. They run a travel agency, have children step by step, and live the life of an ordinary middle-class American family. Days;
On the other hand, they have been following the "organizational" mission deployment, carrying out various desperate surveillance, theft, reconnaissance, subversion and assassination. After the murder, he cleaned up the crime scene, washed his hands, changed his clothes, and then calmly went home to cook dinner and help his daughter with her homework after school, without any psychological barriers.
This couple is deeply embedded in American society and has almost completely integrated into American society. Their neighbor is also a senior FBI agent. When they get along, they always treat this KGB couple as an ordinary American couple who runs a travel agency. It wasn't until the finale of Season 6 that the true identity of the other party was finally figured out.
Although the plots in American dramas that seem calm but are actually turbulent are indeed exaggerated, they are basically based on history and real life.
Moreover, this couple of agents also referenced many real prototypes, such as Abel, the KGB boss who was exposed after being betrayed by an informant in the 1960s; he has settled in New York as an American since 1978 and lived a prosperous life. Shuiqi, who was "forgotten" after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the KGB spy Basky (second from right in the picture below) who voluntarily "surrendered" in 1997, and so on.
Moreover, during the Cold War era, the KGB also built some "immersion" teaching bases in many places. The location of the
base is not marked on the Soviet map and is very mysterious.
Among them, the one that has been disclosed and is the most famous is undoubtedly the "American Town" located in the central Ukrainian city of Vennisia.
"American Town" almost completely replicates every detail of real American society to provide all-round "immersion" teaching and life experience for agents.
Here, KGB instructors and trainees who speak American English have to pretend that they are in "America" and act as Americans from all walks of life.
Here, students can only speak in English with designated accents - some are assigned to speak the Mandarin accented by the elites in the Northeastern United States; others are assigned the "country accent" of red necks from the "Bible Belt" in the South... In short, you must be consistent with your "new identity" that you will adapt to.
In terms of layout, the apartment area is in the center of the city, the middle-class single-family houses are built in the suburbs, and there are cheap motels next to the messy roads.
There are English street signs and advertisements hanging on the streets. Whether it is a supermarket or a grocery store, they are filled with a wide variety of American products. There is no need to queue up to buy things, and all transactions are in US dollars.
The cars on the road all have American license plates, and the most popular Western music is playing in the cars; the burgers, French fries, chicken nuggets and sandwiches in American fast food restaurants are as authentic as possible...
Even Americans The "habit" of wasting food has not gone away either - I only drank half a cup of the large Coke, and I only took two bites of the burger before it was thrown away on the table.
In addition to "immersion training", trainees also need to undergo reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance assessments. For example, after being targeted by a suspicious person in a fast food restaurant, how to borrow information from the library, jump out of the bathroom window, escape from being stalked, and run back to a "safe house" a few blocks away, etc.
However, even so, the main task of these agents who can integrate into the local society after being sent out is still "lurking".
According to the words of former KGB Bassky, who later took the initiative to "surrender", "99% of the time is spent waiting, and only 1% is action".
Therefore, their appearance, speech, behavior, and career choices are no different from ordinary local residents. They all have a common face and are difficult to notice.
Dress up like 007 to "seduce" and drug him, carry a gun in his arms, prepare to kill at all times, carry potassium cyanide with him, and "martyr his country" after being exposed, etc. In fact, they only exist in blockbuster movies. among.
In this regard, the interpretation of the TV series "American Spy" is relatively realistic. The KGB couple's "online" is either a fat aunt or a stumbling old man on crutches. The frequency of contact is not high, and they can just live a normal life like ordinary middle-class Americans.
Moreover, it is similar to the finale of "The American Spy". No matter how ruthless Moscow is, it will not just "kill the donkey". When faced with a crisis, the agents will be taken back at all costs, including the agents' unsuspecting children.
But "The American Spy" is an American drama after all, and it won't pass the review if it's written too well. So we see that the agent couple resolutely returned to the Soviet Union (of course also to avoid being pursued by the FBI). But their eldest daughter, who already knew the truth, chose to stay in the United States at the last moment; their younger son was shocked to learn about his life experience and situation only after his parents had arrived in Moscow.
The scene at the end of the drama is of the two couples standing on the bridge with sad faces, overlooking Moscow, as if life is like a dream...
Of course, as mentioned before, this is an American drama. In reality, we can also see that the agents who were exchanged enjoyed hero-like treatment, with an honor guard waiting for them, and the president personally picking them up, sending flowers and hugging them.
Some people will say this, because President Putin himself was once an agent, and he feels the same way.
Actually, this analogy is not very appropriate. There are roughly three forms of activity for
agents:
. The mysterious hidden front mentioned above, where agents directly pretend to be natives of other countries and completely change their identities; . The public identity is overseas Russians or Russians, but on the surface My job has nothing to do with politics or diplomacy. The typical example is Anna Chapman, the Russian female agent who was arrested by the US FBI and was strongly demanded by netizens around the world to be released because she was too beautiful.
Anna Chapman’s maiden name is “Kushchenko”, and she is of Ukrainian origin in Ukraine. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the whole family was in Stalingrad (now Volgograd), so they became Russian citizens on the spot.
Soviet child Anna Kuschenko
After graduating from the Department of Economics of Moscow People's Friendship University with a master's degree, she went to work in the UK and married an Englishman named Alex Chapman, successfully changing herself. of East Slavic surnames.
However, the two divorced soon, and Anna Chapman began to get involved in the American real estate industry and traveled among the upper class society in the United States as a Russian female entrepreneur. Until he was targeted by the FBI...
Okay, let's look at 3 - the public identity of the intelligence officer.
is typically Putin.
After graduating from university, Putin, who received rigorous training and passed various assessments, was organizationally assigned to the confidential department of the Leningrad KGB as a clerk.
From 1984 to 1985, Putin was sent to the KGB school in Moscow for another year of further training.
Then, he got a good job - stationed at the Dresden KGB workstation in East Germany.
After all, East Germany was the country with the best living conditions in the Soviet-Eastern camp, bar none.
Putin’s workplace is an open intelligence agency, and it is also located next to the East German intelligence agency, the Stasi’s office building in Dresden.
Putin and Lyudmila’s small home is also located in a family community specially designed to house Soviet KGB and Stasi agents.
Therefore, Putin's "agent" identity is not the legendary "lurking in East Germany", it was originally made public.
For the specific "position content" of Putin in East Germany, you can refer to the documentary "Putin" filmed by Russian state television.
During the Cold War, East Germany and the Soviet Union belonged to the intelligence sharing system of the Warsaw Pact bloc. The Soviet intelligence department in Dresden, in addition to collecting intelligence on its own, also had to accept intelligence materials sent by East Germany and organize and analyze them according to rules.
Putin’s main job is to organize, analyze and report intelligence.
At the same time, he is also responsible for daily reception work, including greetings and deliveries in official circles, carrying bags for leaders, picking up people at the station, etc.
For example, the picture below shows a social event between the Soviet KGB intelligence station in Dresden and officials from the Stasi branch of the East German Security Ministry in Dresden in November 1987.
In addition, Putin’s German proficiency has not reached the level where he can directly blend in with the local residents of Germany - everyone can tell that he is a Soviet person wherever he goes.
He often visited a bar called "Am Thor" at that time. An old employee of the bar later recalled that this little Soviet man would always order a large glass of "Redberg" beer in German with a Russian accent, then find a seat by the window and drink it quietly. it.
Much later, in 2006, when Putin visited Germany, he made a special trip to Dresden and revisited the "Am Tol" bar, holding "Redberg" beer and drinking it in his own home. I took this photo at my favorite spot back then.
Therefore, during those years in East Germany, Putin’s work content and identity were actually very different from the Dulitsevs he personally welcomed this time.
has said so much, and finally wishes that the siblings, who were trapped in confusion due to their sudden "return to the motherland", can adapt to the environment smoothly...
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