Russian ‘Spy Factory' in Brazil Exposed: What We Know
A team of federal agents from Brazil has been covertly unraveling the Russian spy ring, which used the country as an "assembly line for deep-cover operatives," according to a New York Times investigation published on Wednesday.
Newsweek has contacted the Russian Foreign Ministry for comment by email.
Agentstvo, an independent investigative Russian news outlet, described the exposé on Thursday as "one of the biggest failures of the Russian intelligence services" comparable to when a network of 11 spies was exposed in the U.S. 15 years ago.
Brazilian counterintelligence agents uncovered at least nine Russian officers operating under cover identities over the past three years. Six of them had never been publicly identified until now, the Times reported.
The unmasking began in April 2022, weeks into Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when the CIA alerted Brazil's Federal Police to Victor Muller Ferreira, real name, Sergey Cherkasov. He had just landed an internship at the International Criminal Court in The Hague as it was about to start investigating Russia for war crimes in Ukraine.
Cherkasov, who was admitted to Johns Hopkins University's graduate school in Washington, D.C., in 2018, is currently serving a five-year prison term in Brazil for document forgery. Authorities say that Cherkasov, who spent nearly a decade building a fake identity as his alias Ferreira, is a spy for the Russian military intelligence agency, GRU.
He had spent seven to eight years in Brazil building up his cover identity, but when he arrived in the Netherlands, Dutch authorities denied him entry and sent him back to São Paulo.
His Brazilian passport and other identifying documents checked out, but when police found his birth certificate his story and Russia's operation in Brazil began to fall apart.
The certificate stated that he was born in 1989 in Rio de Janeiro to a Brazilian mother, a real woman who died in 1993. But when agents tracked down her family, they learned she never had a child. Authorities couldn't find anyone who matched the name listed as his father on the document.
Intelligence agents then began looking for other so-called "ghosts" in Brazil under an investigation dubbed Operation East.
"Everything started with Sergey," a senior Brazilian official told the publication.
Intelligence experts assessed that perhaps Russian authorities ordered many of the suspected spies named in the investigation home as the world shifted its focus on Russia after President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Only Cherkasov was prosecuted and sentenced in Brazil.
Some of the others are thought to have been recalled to Russia before they had perfected their cover identities.
Agentstvo reported Thursday that Russian spy Olga Tyutereva, for example, has since returned to Russia and is using her real name and working as a teacher in the Magadan region.
Agentstvo said it found digital traces in Russia of three more spies from the list published in the Times.
An FBI affidavit states that in his two years in Washington, Cherkasov filed reports to the GRU on how senior Biden administration officials were responding to the build-up of Russia's military near the Ukrainian border before Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
Jane Bradley, co-author of the Times investigation, told NPR that Brazil has a "very multicultural, diverse population" and so "it's easy for anyone to blend in."
"The second thing is that Brazilian passports are, you know, one of the most useful and powerful passports in the world. It gets you into a lot of countries without a visa, so it's a very powerful, useful passport to have."
"And then the other point is more interesting and more complex, which is the Brazilian ID system. How you obtain birth certificates basically has an exemption—a loophole, if you like—that makes it easier to apply for a birth certificate than most other countries elsewhere," she added.
The spies are unlikely to work abroad again with their covers blown, the Times reported.
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