A team of investigators claims to have unmasked a Russian covert spy for Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, who spent a decade posing as a Latin American jewelry designer and partying with NATO personnel in Naples.
Investigators say the woman called herself María Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera, and told people she met that she was the daughter of a German father and a Peruvian mother, born in the city of Callao, Peru, The Guardian reports.
But he was actually a career GRU officer, according to an investigation by Bellingcat in association with various media outlets, including La Repubblica and Der Spiegel. “Rivera” was what the intelligence community calls an illegal undercover agent, trained to pass as a foreigner.
Illegals have been used by Moscow intelligence agencies since the early Soviet period. Sometimes, they stay living with their false identities for decades. Posing as “Rivera”, the illegal moved between Rome, Malta and Paris, and finally settled in 2013 in Naples, headquarters of the Allied Joint Forces Command of NATO.
She opened a jewelry boutique called Serein and led an active social life. Her acquaintances said that she befriended many NATO personnel and even had a brief romantic relationship with one of them.
Illegals have traditionally been extremely difficult for counterintelligence agencies to find, but in a world of biometrics, facial recognition software, and open source investigative possibilities, it has become more difficult for Russia to keep its agents under the radar. .
Christo Grozev, CEO and lead investigator at Bellingcat, said in an interview that he first came across the trail of a possible illegal when he was looking at a leaked database of border crossings recorded by Belarusian guards and provided by a group of opposing hackers. to the regime of Alexander Lukashenko.
Grozev searched for Russian passport numbers in ranges known to have been used by GRU agents and found numerous hits. Most had Russian names, but one stood out: María Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera.
Grozev discovered that he was traveling on several Russian passports with serial numbers in a range used by other known GRU operatives, including an officer who had been indicted for the alleged novichok poisoning of Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev.
He also discovered that on September 15, 2018, “Rivera” bought a ticket from Naples to Moscow. Apparently, the agent was removed from the field by her bosses, who feared that other operatives with similar passport numbers could be compromised. She does not appear to have left Russia again.
