Joe Parkinson

They never got a parking ticket, let alone any kind of, you know, tax infraction. They always made sure they reported on time. There was nothing flash, nothing to draw attention to themselves.

Despite all the discipline and the layers of lies, that ultimately was the mistake that gave them away.

He has a lot of loyalty from his men. He needed that because the assignment he was about to take on, no Slovenian spy chief had ever had to take on anything quite like that before.

It's the toughest thing you can do in counterintelligence work.

Because the secret is so potentially explosive, he can tell very few people. So to begin with, he only shares this with the prime minister and the national security advisor. And they have to formulate a team and a task force who themselves aren't even briefed on the full scope of what they're looking for. But they know they're looking for someone.

So they have to start rifling through all of the data and the information and the travel records, you name it, of people that they think could be potentially suspicious.

The children weren't told the truth about why their parents had been arrested, of course. They didn't know that their parents spoke Russian.

Could you believe it? She could go and watch Argentina wearing an Argentine shirt and then be in the same hometown where she'd grown up.

Obviously, with a Russian diplomatic passport, they wouldn't have needed a visa. They wouldn't have needed to, you know, potentially alert that they were applying for a visa. They could have just gone in. And so that could be one reason.

Maybe the trip came together at the last minute. They didn't have enough time to apply for a visa. That's one of the unknowables here.

A pair of Russians traveling on diplomatic passports, traveling with two children of Argentinian nationality, flew to Moscow. That's all it was, but just seemed slightly odd. When they start asking if there's any record, either in Slovenia or elsewhere, of these particular Russian diplomats serving at embassies anywhere across Europe, they get nothing back. It's even more of a mystery.

It's in his name. In Russia, a son will have his father's name as his middle name.

When they started to look for the father's name with the same surname... on social media, rifling through this huge kind of haystack of information, looking through Russian sources, they found an image of an individual's house who matched that name. And when they zoomed in on the photo, against the wall was a picture of two newlyweds.

Surveil them, track them, build the case against them, all without giving them any hint that they were being watched.

They have to map their routine, understand, you know, that these really are the people that they're looking for, and then make a plan in concert with their allies, the CIA, MI6, the other European agencies, about when and exactly how they're going to arrest them.

It's a Monday morning. People undercover in civilian cars all across this side street. They waited until the family had dropped off the children, had come back.

Special forces in masks, sniper rifles, crept up over the fence, lifted the shutters that they put down on the windows. And the raid begins.

Special forces shouting, get down, get down. Artyom actually fell off his chair and his laptop was still open, communicating securely to Moscow. He doesn't even have time to close out the window while it's still actively running. The Slovenian police see Maria, who falls to the floor and begins crying. She begins to cry. She claims that she's injured. The police aren't sure what to do with her.

They pick her up. tell her that she's under arrest. And then she kind of returns to her feet. And from that moment, according to people who were there at the raid, her demeanor completely changed. And she stands there quietly while the arrest is finished. She then became poker-faced and she said absolutely nothing.

there was a special compartment in the refrigerator that looked like it had been purpose-built. And when the Slovenian police removed it, they found hundreds of thousands of euros in crisp new Hyde nomination notes. They also found a bunch of technology that they weren't familiar with, what seemed to be kind of jerry-rigged USB sticks, flash drives that seemed to have another facility to them.

And a lot of this stuff was so high-tech and unfamiliar to the Slovenians that they ended up sending it over to the U.S. to try and figure out what this stuff was.

This couple in Slovenia were mentioned to us at one point as people we should watch.

This prisoner swap was a kind of window into a really messy, complicated world. And the secret world underneath it, where these countries are all jockeying and vying for influence. It was a story that is deeper and richer than I think anybody first understood when they looked at it.

Yeah, they really have become kind of poster children for what Putin defines as this new Russian patriotism and for the primacy of the secret services inside that system.

They talked about the sacrifices that they made. They talked about... It's almost like a recruitment campaign.

This is a woman with a high tolerance for pain. She somehow manages in that moment of pain and difficulty not to give away anything of her real identity. It is buried so deep.

They look like a study in a normal family next door.

Yeah. She has mousy brown hair. She's wearing a blue shirt, open at the collar, jeans and plimsolls. And with her is an 11-year-old girl.

Putin loved this stuff. He was massively inspired as a young man by watching these shows.

And inspired enough that, you know, quite soon afterwards, he walked through the Leningrad office of the KGB through the front door.

He has said that while he was in Dresden, part of what he did was working as an illegal support officer.

A daughter has her hair up and wearing Harry Potter sneakers. This mom holding her daughter's hand is trailed by her husband and her son. They walk down the staircase towards this red carpet where the dictator of Russia, Vladimir Putin, is waiting. And he has a bouquet of flowers.

So that can be anything from passing messages or passing resources to helping to find the documents to create these fake identities for new illegals.

Yeah.

Again, very vague. But when you start digging into the profile, you see there was method in all of these decisions. How so? An art gallery as a front is not only a place where it's easy to explain money coming in that can then move out through the accounts.

It's also a place that gives you an easy cover for traveling around Europe to go and see exhibitions on the surface, where, of course, you then have the ability to go and see other people without arousing suspicion.

She was also doing some of this crazy, like, old-school Cold War tradecraft of spying. It was incredibly ornate and incredibly what you would think, actually, of, like, old-fashioned and anachronistic. But the people that we talked to whose job it is to try and track this say that this is the toughest stuff to unveil.