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Time of India
24-05-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
The mother of all spy factories begins to unravel as cops in Brazil uncover long-hidden trails
Artem Shmyrev had everyone fooled. The Russian intelligence officer seemed to have built the perfect cover identity. He ran a successful 3D printing business and shared an upscale apartment in Rio de Janeiro with his Brazilian girlfriend and a cat. But most important, he had an authentic birth certificate and passport that cemented his alias as Gerhard Daniel Campos Wittich, a 34-year-old Brazilian citizen. After six years lying low, he was impatient to begin real spy work. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Lắp đặt dễ dàng: Khám phá gạch cao su mới - không cần keo, không lộn xộn! Gạch | Quảng cáo tìm kiếm Tìm Ngay "No one wants to feel loser," he wrote in a 2021 text message to his Russian wife, who was also an intelligence officer, using imperfect English. "That is why I continue working and hoping." He was not alone. For years, a New York Times investigation found, Russia used Brazil as a launchpad for its most elite intelligence officers, known as illegals. The spies shed their Russian pasts. They started businesses, made friends and had love affairs -- the building blocks of entirely new identities. Live Events The goal was not to spy on Brazil, but to become Brazilian. Once cloaked in credible back stories, they would set off for the United States, Europe or the Middle East and begin working in earnest. One deep-cover operative started a jewelry business. Another was a model. A third was admitted into an American university. There was a Brazilian researcher who landed work in Norway, and a married couple who eventually went to Portugal. Then it all came crashing down. For the past three years, Brazilian counterintelligence agents have uncovered at least nine Russian officers operating under Brazilian cover identities, according to documents and interviews. The investigation has already spanned at least eight countries, officials said, with intelligence coming from the United States, Israel, the Netherlands, Uruguay and other Western security services. Using hundreds of investigative documents and interviews with dozens of police and intelligence officials across three continents, the Times pieced together details of the Russian spy operation in Brazil and the secretive effort to take it out. Brazil's investigation dealt a devastating blow to Moscow's illegals program. It eliminated a cadre of highly trained officers who will be difficult to replace. At least two were arrested. Others beat a hasty retreat to Russia. With their covers blown, they will most likely never work abroad again. At the heart of this extraordinary defeat was a team of counterintelligence agents from the Brazilian Federal Police. From their headquarters in the capital, Brasília, they spent years combing through millions of Brazilian identity records, looking for patterns. It became known as Operation East. Ghosts in the System In early April 2022, the CIA passed an urgent message to Brazil's Federal Police. The Americans reported that an undercover officer in Russia's military intelligence service had recently turned up in the Netherlands to take an internship with the International Criminal Court -- just as it began to investigate Russian war crimes in Ukraine. The would-be intern was traveling on a Brazilian passport under the name Victor Muller Ferreira. He'd received a graduate degree from Johns Hopkins University under that name. But his real name, the CIA said, was Sergey Cherkasov. Dutch border officials had denied him entry, and he was now on a plane to São Paulo. With limited evidence and only hours to act, the Brazilians had no authority to arrest Cherkasov at the airport. So, for several days, the police kept him under surveillance while he remained free at a São Paulo hotel. Finally, the officers got a warrant and arrested him -- not for espionage , but on the more modest charge of using fraudulent documents. Even that turned out to be a much harder case to make than anyone expected. Cherkasov's Brazilian passport was authentic. He had a Brazilian voter registration card as required by law and a certificate showing that he had completed compulsory military service. All were genuine. "There was no link between him and great Mother Russia," said an investigator at the Federal Police, who spoke, as did others, on condition of anonymity because the investigation is still open. It was only when the police found his birth certificate that Cherkasov's story -- and the entire Russian operation in Brazil -- began to crumble. The document indicated that Victor Muller Ferreira had been born in Rio de Janeiro in 1989 to a Brazilian mother, a real person who had died four years later. But when the police located her family, agents learned that the woman had never had a child. The authorities never found anyone matching the father's name. Federal agents began searching for what they called "ghosts": people with legitimate birth certificates, who spent their lives without any record of actually being in Brazil and who appeared suddenly as adults rapidly collecting identity documents. Agents began looking for patterns in millions of birth records, passports, driver's licenses and social security numbers. That analysis allowed Operation East to unravel the whole Russian operation. "Everything started with Sergey," a senior Brazilian official said. A Break in the Case One of the first names to surface when investigators started their search was that of Gerhard Daniel Campos Wittich. His birth certificate indicated that he was born in Rio in 1986, but he seemed to have appeared out of nowhere in 2015. By the time agents began investigating, Shmyrev had built a cover identity so convincing that even his own girlfriend and colleagues had no clue. He spoke perfect Portuguese, tinged with an accent that he explained was the result of a childhood spent in Austria. He seemed to pour everything he had into his printing company, 3D Rio, which he built from scratch and appeared genuinely to care about, according to former colleagues. He spent long hours at work on the 16th floor of a high-rise in central Rio, a block away from the U.S. Consulate. Sometimes he sent employees home so he could work alone. "He was a work addict," said Felipe Martinez, a former client who befriended the Russian he knew as Daniel. "He thought big, you know?" Privately, Shmyrev was bored and frustrated with undercover life. "No real achievements in work," Shmyrev wrote in one text message to his wife. "I am not where I have to be for 2 years already." His wife, Irina Shmyreva, another Russian spy texting from Greece, was unsympathetic. "If you wanted a normal family life, well you have made a fundamentally wrong choice," she responded. The texts are part of a cache of documents that were shared with foreign intelligence services and seen by the Times. They were sent in August 2021 and were recovered later from Shmyrev's phone. Six months later, Russia invaded Ukraine. Suddenly, intelligence services around the world were working together and making it a priority to disrupt Kremlin espionage. The lives of Russian spies deployed worldwide were thrown into upheaval. First came Cherkasov, the intern who was arrested weeks after the invasion. Then Mikhail Mikushin, who had been under Brazilian investigation, turned up in Norway and was arrested. Two Russian deep-cover operatives were arrested in Slovenia, where they lived under Argentine cover identities. By late 2022, Brazilian investigators were closing in on Shmyrev. He slipped the country just days before the Federal Police unraveled his identity. Shmyrev had a return ticket dated Feb. 2, 2023. So the agents obtained arrest warrants and search orders for his addresses. When Shmyrev landed on Brazilian soil, they would be ready. But he never came back. 'What's Worse Than Being Arrested?' Shmyrev wasn't the only Russian spy to slip through the Brazilians' fingers. Every time the agents uncovered a name, they seemed to have been too late. A married couple in their 30s, living as Manuel Francisco Steinbruck Pereira and Adriana Carolina Costa Silva Pereira, had decamped to Portugal in 2018 and vanished. A bunch seemed to be in Uruguay. A woman ostensibly named Maria Luisa Dominguez Cardozo had a Brazilian birth certificate and later obtained a Uruguayan passport. And there was another married couple: Federico Luiz Gonzalez Rodriguez and his wife, Maria Isabel Moresco Garcia, a blonde spy who posed as a model. The Brazilian agents running Operation East had spent countless hours uncovering the names and still had no case except for the false document charge against Cherkasov. But they shared what they had learned with the world's intelligence agencies, whose officers cross-checked that information against records of known Russian intelligence operatives. And they found matches, which in some cases allowed the Brazilians to attach a real name to the fake Brazilian identities. The couple living in Portugal under the name Pereira, for instance, turned out to be actually Vladimir Aleksandrovich Danilov and Yekaterina Leonidovna Danilova, according to two Western intelligence officials. Even after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Brazil maintained a friendly relationship with Moscow. So the Kremlin's use of Brazilian territory for a large-scale espionage operation was seen as a betrayal. The authorities wanted to send a message. "We just put our heads together and thought, 'What's worse than being arrested as a spy?'" the senior Brazilian investigator said. "It's being exposed as a spy." To do that, investigators came up with an idea. They could use Interpol , the world's largest policing organization, to burn Russia's spies. Last fall, the Brazilians issued a series of Interpol blue notices -- alerts seeking information on a person. The notices circulated the names, photographs and fingerprints of the Russian spies, including Shmyrev and Cherkasov, to all 196 member countries. Interpol, as an independent body, does not deal with politicized issues like espionage. To get around that, the Brazilian authorities said that the Russians were being investigated for using fraudulent documents. Uruguay issued similar alerts, seen by the Times, for those suspected of being Russian spies who had turned up there under Brazilian identities. Their real names, intelligence officials said, were Roman Olegovich Koval, Irina Alekseyevna Antonova and Olga Igorevna Tyutereva. Koval and Antonova, the married couple, had suddenly left Brazil on a flight to Uruguay in 2023, investigators said. Tyutereva's last known location was Namibia, according to the senior official. The Interpol notices do not include the real names, but include the photographs and other identifying information. With their identities logged in police databases, and their true names flagged by spy services, the operatives most likely will never be able to work as foreign spies again. Of all the spies, only Cherkasov remains in prison. He was convicted of falsifying documents and sentenced to 15 years, but his sentence was reduced to five years. In an apparent gambit to get him home early, the Russian government claimed that he was a wanted drug dealer and filed court documents asking to have him extradited. But the Brazilians swiftly countered. If Cherkasov was a drug dealer, the prosecutors argued, then it was essential that he be held in prison even longer so the police could investigate. He might otherwise have been released by now. But he remains in a Brasília lockup. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
NZ Herald
22-05-2025
- Politics
- NZ Herald
How Vladimir Putin turned Brazil into a spy factory
Russia's intelligence services turned Brazil into an assembly line for deep-cover operatives. A team of federal agents from the South American country has been quietly dismantling it. Artem Shmyrev had everyone fooled. The Russian intelligence officer seemed to have built the perfect cover identity. He ran a successful 3D printing business and shared an upscale apartment in Rio de Janeiro with his Brazilian girlfriend and a fluffy orange-and-white Maine coon cat. But most important, he had an authentic birth certificate
New York Times
21-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
The Spy Factory
Artem Shmyrev had everyone fooled. The Russian intelligence officer seemed to have built the perfect cover identity. He ran a successful 3-D printing business and shared an upscale apartment in Rio de Janeiro with his Brazilian girlfriend and a fluffy orange-and-white Maine coon cat. But most important, he had an authentic birth certificate and passport that cemented his alias as Gerhard Daniel Campos Wittich, a 34-year-old Brazilian citizen. After six years lying low, he was impatient to begin real spy work. 'No one wants to feel loser,' he wrote in a 2021 text message to his Russian wife, who was also an intelligence officer, using imperfect English. 'That is why I continue working and hoping.' He was not alone. For years, a New York Times investigation found, Russia used Brazil as a launchpad for its most elite intelligence officers, known as illegals. In an audacious and far-reaching operation, the spies shed their Russian pasts. They started businesses, made friends and had love affairs — events that, over many years, became the building blocks of entirely new identities. Major Russian spy operations have been uncovered in the past, including in the United States in 2010. This was different. The goal was not to spy on Brazil, but to become Brazilian. Once cloaked in credible back stories, they would set off for the United States, Europe or the Middle East and begin working in earnest. The Russians essentially turned Brazil into an assembly line for deep-cover operatives like Mr. Shmyrev. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
21-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Text Messages Between Russian Spies, Annotated
Artem Shmyrev and his wife, Irina, were members of an elite few. After nearly a decade of rigorous training in Russian spycraft, the pair were working as deep-cover operatives with fake identities that they planned to use for the rest of their careers. Their assignments — hers in Greece and his in Brazil — are seen in Russia's intelligence agencies as a prestigious opportunity. A privilege. But text messages between the pair, written in the late summer of 2021 and recovered from Mr. Shmyrev's phone, reveal the personal, often frustrating side of their lives. The Times reviewed transcripts of the messages, which were shared with foreign intelligence services as part of a wide-ranging investigation into Russian espionage. What follows are three exchanges, taken from the larger trove of messages, that offer unique glimpses into the work and the loneliness. In what appears to be standard procedure for deep-cover operatives, they exchanged messages in English, which was imperfect. Artem I know pretty much how everything is. No real achievements in work that I supposed to do, I am not where I have to be for 2 years already. I have no money left, I have no wife while I am in my middle 30th, and my old family had lots of troubles. Just work and hope that I really have, but noone wants to feel loser that is why I continue working and hoping. And it is not self pity, just normal reality. Artem Same as always Artem Thoughts Irina Can you please stop? Irina I am sorry but this is mental abuse at this point. I have told you again and again, that it is all very subjunctive and that everything is not bad but you keep thinking and saying this - I cannot help you if you think this way. I am not a shrink, not a magician and I am trying to figure things out for myself just like everyone else. This exchange captures an important dynamic, not just in a long-distance marriage but in espionage. Russia's foreign intelligence service, the S.V.R., often unites its deep-cover operatives in marriage early in their careers. They are sent into the world as a couple, partners in espionage and life. Such pairings are meant to diminish the sense of isolation that can afflict such spies during years, and sometimes decades, spent undercover, experts say. The Shmyrevs were different. They were sent to separate countries and were apart for years. Exchanges like the one above show the challenges of operating alone. They indicate that the couple had grown frustrated with the day-to-day drudgery and, at times, with each other. Irina Yes it is not as it was promised and it is bad - they basically trick ppl into it and I see it as a bad thing. It is dishonest and not constructive. Irina But here we are now. Irina Try to enjoy the good things Artem I am trying, yes. Will be trying harder. Thank you for writing your opinion. This exchange adds to a body of evidence, collected in previous Russian espionage cases, that suggests that deep-cover work is not as glamorous as recruits had hoped. Government documents in a 2010 case in the United States describe Russian spies toiling without access to secrets. Artem worked as 3-D printer in Brazil, building his cover as he itched to begin real work. From afar, the couple tried to support each other as both coped with the demands of a job that turned out to be much different than they had expected. Irina I am trying to do this and that. Irina Courses … What do they care about a bunch of American students Artem no, your study Irina I doubt they view it as a result Artem Look, if you show something as a result and describe it nice, then it is one. The messages provide tantalizing hints about the type of espionage the spies were conducting, though the details are not entirely clear. In their exchanges, Artem pressed Irina to spend more time writing reports so their bosses in Moscow understood the effort that she was putting into her work. Irina, though, did not think that her work — translating websites, creating online advertising campaigns and, apparently, taking classes to monitor a group of American students — was worth reporting. Irina If you want to think your life is shit - it is your choice. Irina Everyone has problems, different ones. Irina You are healthy, you are attractive, you are doing something that is not a bad work and you are complaining a lot, ok? Irina And mostly about something that is a matter of perspective Irina If you wanted a normal family life, well you have made a fundamentally wrong choice. Artem You said, thanks. Mostly, it seems, the texts portray two spies who needed to vent their frustrations. How much contact they had with people who knew their true identities is unclear. Contact with each other at least gave them a chance, on occasion, to be themselves.
