Searching for the life of a spy is like chasing the trail of a ghost. África de las Heras, codename Patria, was a friend, a nanny, a caregiver, but also a stranger, a murderer, a spy, and a heroine. “She was everything at once,” confesses Argentine writer and columnist Laura Ramos, who has reconstructed the spy's life in the book Mi niñera de la KGB. De las Heras, hidden under the name María Luisa, was a supposed Spanish dressmaker who became the most decorated Soviet spy of the KGB, involved in the communist resistance against dictator Francisco Franco, the fight against German troops in Ukraine, the attempted assassination of Che Guevara, and the murder of Lenin's successor, Lev Trotsky. “Her job was precisely to leave no trace. But, paradoxically, the most important discoveries came through the back door, through the memories of the children she had looked after,” assures the writer, pointing to a search for the intangible, archival, and practically mythical memory of María Luisa.

It's unsettling to see Donald Trump meeting with Viktor Orbán and promising him flexibility so that Hungary can continue buying gas and oil from Russia, despite the sanctions against Putin, circumventing US proposals to end the war in Ukraine. And all this knowing, as Trump knows very well, that Orbán's Hungary is a center of espionage that has the institutions of the European Union in its sights. Trump knows that FSB agents move freely in Budapest, and he surely doesn't care. It neither moves him nor affects him. He carries the accusation of having collaborated with the Kageb regime almost four decades ago. For thirty-eight years, and in different guises, the US president would have been the agent Krasnov..

Moscow's Lubyanka building has gone down in history as an emblem of Stalinist terror: the KGB's spies' headquarters in Moscow and the prison where dissidents were interrogated and tortured before being sent to Siberian labor camps. The headquarters was closed in the 1960s, but it wasn't until 2006, 15 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, that the secret services relinquished control of the last pretrial detention centers. Now, however, a new law will allow the FSB, the KGB's successor, to recover its prison network, and human rights organizations have already raised the alarm.