The Nanny Was a Spy: Unmasking Africa de las Heras, KGB Operative
A chilling tale of espionage and deception has emerged with the publication of Laura Ramos’s My KGB Nanny, revealing the hidden life of a woman known to her as “María Luisa,” who was, in reality, one of the 20th century’s most valuable Soviet agents. Ramos, now 69, recounts a childhood in Montevideo, Uruguay, where the seemingly innocuous woman cared for her and her brother after school, unaware of the elaborate network of espionage she commanded.
In the afternoons of 1964, eight-year-old Laura Ramos was routinely met at the door of the Francia school by a Spanish woman known to the family as María Luisa. Neither she nor her brother, Víctor, suspected that this woman was Africa de las Heras, operating under the KGB code name “Patria,” and a master of disguise who had previously infiltrated the inner circle of León Trotsky in Mexico as María de la Sierra. For the children, she was simply the kind woman who walked them home, provided snacks, and occasionally mended their clothes.
“The dressmaker!” Ramos recalled when asked about María Luisa in 2018, describing a figure with “graying hair, very sober, completely nondescript, with long skirts carrying a package of pastries from the Oro del Rhine confectionery.” She remembers a woman with a “pleasant manner, as an equal, but not warm or affectionate.” This innocent image shattered upon learning the truth: that María Luisa was not a dressmaker or nanny, but a decades-long intelligence operative directing the KGB’s spy network in South America.
Ramos’s five years of research transformed her childhood memories, revealing a relentless agent capable of calculated deception and, potentially, murder. “I will discover that our nanny poisoned her husband, an Italian spy,” Ramos writes in My KGB Nanny, and “a creepy recording will reveal to me a second crime: her participation in the assassination of Trotsky.”
Born in Ceuta, Spain, in 1909 and dying in Moscow in 1988, de las Heras lived a life of constant reinvention, working as a textile worker in Madrid, a militia member in Barcelona, a secretary in Mexico, a radio operator in Ukraine, and a seamstress in Paris, before finally settling as a nanny in Uruguay. She deceived everyone she encountered, including Ramos’s mother, the Argentine feminist Faby Carvallo—known as “The Magician”—and a circle of Uruguayan intellectuals.
The Uruguayans, Ramos explains, initially viewed de las Heras with a degree of pride, recognizing her as a hero who had aided Spaniards fleeing the Spanish Civil War and parachuted into Nazi-occupied Ukraine to gather intelligence. However, this admiration was tempered by a sense of condescension. “They treated her condescendingly, not as an equal, and she had to ride on those prejudices to be accepted,” Ramos notes, highlighting the biases based on her Spanish nationality, age, and unmarried status.
De las Heras skillfully exploited these prejudices, using them as cover while building her network. Her arrival in Montevideo in 1948, following a brief and unhappy marriage to the staunchly anti-communist musician and writer Felisberto Hernández in Paris, was strategically calculated. Ramos points out that de las Heras settled in Uruguay “because at that time what Stalin wanted was data on the atomic bomb.” Montevideo, known as the “Switzerland of America,” offered political stability, a friendly environment, and crucially, a Russian representation that allowed for both legal and illegal espionage operations. She established a radio telegraph center to communicate directly with Moscow, becoming the head of the KGB’s Latin American operations.
After utilizing Hernández to regularize her legal status and establish connections, de las Heras moved on, marrying Valentino Marchetti, another Soviet spy whose real name was Giovanni Antonio Bertoni. Ramos suspects Marchetti’s sudden death in 1964 was not accidental, but a carefully orchestrated murder carried out by his wife. “She gave us snacks in the same place where she poisoned her husband,” Ramos alleges, recalling the unsettling coincidence of the timing.
The accusations against de las Heras extend beyond suspected poisoning. Ramos believes she was romantically involved with Ramón Mercader, Trotsky’s assassin, and that she provided him with crucial intelligence about Trotsky’s home in Mexico, facilitating the assassination. Furthermore, she is implicated in the murder of Uruguayan historian Arbelio Rodríguez, who, according to the widow’s testimony, was the intended target of an assassination attempt meant for Che Guevara. “The same doctor who performed the autopsy on Arbelio Ramírez is the one who prepared Valentino’s death certificate,” Ramos reveals, pointing to a disturbing pattern of suspicious deaths linked to de las Heras.
The fallout from these revelations continues to resonate within families affected by de las Heras’s actions. The children of Ramírez and his widow, Esther Dosil, remain estranged, their relationship fractured by the legacy of María Luisa’s deception. “They are like Cain and Abel,” Ramos observes, “they haven’t spoken for years. And all for what? Because of María Luisa. María Luisa is at the center of this family’s drama.”
Ramos’s investigation involved extensive travel, from Ceuta, de las Heras’s birthplace, to Spain, where she first became involved in Republican activism, and to the Mitrokhin Archive in Cambridge, where she uncovered evidence of her nanny’s KGB connections. Returning to Montevideo, however, proved emotionally challenging, forcing her to confront a childhood she had long resisted revisiting. Growing up as the daughter of influential Trotskyists, Jorge Abelardo Ramos and Carvallo, Ramos sought to distance herself from their ideological world, finding solace in the moralizing tales of Little Women.
Despite the unsettling revelations, Ramos insists that My KGB Nanny does not offer reconciliation with her past, but rather a forced re-evaluation. She admits to having “romanticized” her childhood, imbuing it with a “Jane Austen spirit” to soften the edges of a politically charged upbringing.
Ultimately, Ramos’s exploration of her past has also yielded a new understanding of her mother, recognizing her as a pioneering feminist activist and a woman of extraordinary charisma. “Suddenly it took on a more historical dimension,” Ramos reflects, “and there was something that was not just feminism, but it was her way of living, so unique, so extravagant seen from the outside, but that made her a kind of poetry incarnate.” It is this poetry, she believes, that ultimately inspired her to write and unravel the secrets of the woman who once walked her home from school, a woman who was, in reality, a master spy.
