However most necessary, he had an genuine start certificates and passport that cemented his alias as Gerhard Daniel Campos Wittich, a 34-year-old Brazilian citizen.
After six years mendacity low, he was impatient to start actual spy work.
“Nobody needs to really feel loser,” he wrote in a 2021 textual content message to his Russian spouse, who was additionally an intelligence officer, utilizing imperfect English. “That’s the reason I proceed working and hoping.”
He was not alone. For years, a New York Occasions investigation discovered, Russia used Brazil as a launchpad for its most elite intelligence officers, often known as illegals. The spies shed their Russian pasts. They began companies, made pals and had amorous affairs — the constructing blocks of totally new identities.
The purpose was to not spy on Brazil, however to turn into Brazilian. As soon as cloaked in credible again tales, they might set off for the USA, Europe or the Center East and start working in earnest. One deep-cover operative began a jewellery enterprise. One other was a mannequin. A 3rd was admitted into an American college. There was a Brazilian researcher who landed work in Norway, and a married couple who finally went to Portugal. Then all of it got here crashing down.
For the previous three years, Brazilian counterintelligence brokers have uncovered at the least 9 Russian officers working beneath Brazilian cowl identities, in response to paperwork and interviews. The investigation has already spanned at the least eight nations, officers stated, with intelligence coming from the USA, Israel, the Netherlands, Uruguay and different Western safety providers.
Utilizing lots of of investigative paperwork and interviews with dozens of police and intelligence officers throughout three continents, the Occasions pieced collectively particulars 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 eradicated a cadre of extremely educated officers who can be tough to switch. Not less than two have been arrested. Others beat a hasty retreat to Russia. With their covers blown, they are going to almost certainly by no means work overseas once more.
On the coronary heart of this extraordinary defeat was a staff of counterintelligence brokers from the Brazilian Federal Police.
From their headquarters within the capital, Brasília, they spent years combing by means of thousands and thousands of Brazilian identification data, in search of patterns.
It grew to become often known as Operation East.
Ghosts within the System
In early April 2022, the CIA handed an pressing message to Brazil’s Federal Police.
The Individuals reported that an undercover officer in Russia’s army intelligence service had just lately turned up within the Netherlands to take an internship with the Worldwide Prison Courtroom — simply because it started to research Russian warfare crimes in Ukraine.
The would-be intern was touring on a Brazilian passport beneath the identify Victor Muller Ferreira. He’d obtained a graduate diploma from Johns Hopkins College beneath that identify. However his actual identify, the CIA stated, was Sergey Cherkasov. Dutch border officers had denied him entry, and he was now on a aircraft to São Paulo.
With restricted proof and solely hours to behave, the Brazilians had no authority to arrest Cherkasov on the airport. So, for a number of days, the police stored him beneath surveillance whereas he remained free at a São Paulo lodge.
Lastly, the officers acquired a warrant and arrested him — not for espionage, however on the extra modest cost of utilizing fraudulent paperwork.
Even that turned out to be a a lot more durable case to make than anybody anticipated.
Cherkasov’s Brazilian passport was genuine. He had a Brazilian voter registration card as required by legislation and a certificates exhibiting that he had accomplished obligatory army service.
All have been real.
“There was no hyperlink between him and nice Mom Russia,” stated an investigator on the Federal Police, who spoke, as did others, on situation of anonymity as a result of the investigation continues to be open.
It was solely when the police discovered his start certificates that Cherkasov’s story — and your complete Russian operation in Brazil — started to crumble.
The doc indicated that Victor Muller Ferreira had been born in Rio de Janeiro in 1989 to a Brazilian mom, an actual one that had died 4 years later.
However when the police positioned her household, brokers discovered that the lady had by no means had a baby. The authorities by no means discovered anybody matching the daddy’s identify.
Federal brokers started trying to find what they referred to as “ghosts”: folks with authentic start certificates, who spent their lives with none file of truly being in Brazil and who appeared all of the sudden as adults quickly accumulating identification paperwork.
Brokers started in search of patterns in thousands and thousands of start data, passports, driver’s licenses and social safety numbers.
That evaluation allowed Operation East to unravel the entire Russian operation.
“Every thing began with Sergey,” a senior Brazilian official stated.
A Break within the Case
One of many first names to floor when investigators began their search was that of Gerhard Daniel Campos Wittich. His start certificates indicated that he was born in Rio in 1986, however he appeared to have appeared out of nowhere in 2015.
By the point brokers started investigating, Shmyrev had constructed a canopy identification so convincing that even his personal girlfriend and colleagues had no clue. He spoke excellent Portuguese, tinged with an accent that he defined was the results of a childhood spent in Austria.
He appeared to pour every part he had into his printing firm, 3D Rio, which he constructed from scratch and appeared genuinely to care about, in response to former colleagues. He spent lengthy hours at work on the sixteenth flooring of a high-rise in central Rio, a block away from the U.S. Consulate. Typically he despatched workers house so he might work alone.
“He was a piece addict,” stated Felipe Martinez, a former consumer who befriended the Russian he knew as Daniel. “He thought massive, you already know?”
Privately, Shmyrev was bored and annoyed with undercover life.
“No actual achievements in work,” Shmyrev wrote in a single textual content message to his spouse. “I’m not the place I’ve to be for two years already.”
His spouse, Irina Shmyreva, one other Russian spy texting from Greece, was unsympathetic. “For those who wished a traditional household life, nicely you will have made a essentially incorrect alternative,” she responded.
The texts are a part of a cache of paperwork that have been shared with overseas intelligence providers and seen by the Occasions. They have been despatched in August 2021 and have been recovered later from Shmyrev’s cellphone.
Six months later, Russia invaded Ukraine. Instantly, intelligence providers all over the world have been working collectively and making it a precedence to disrupt Kremlin espionage. The lives of Russian spies deployed worldwide have been thrown into upheaval.
First got here Cherkasov, the intern who was arrested weeks after the invasion. Then Mikhail Mikushin, who had been beneath Brazilian investigation, turned up in Norway and was arrested. Two Russian deep-cover operatives have been arrested in Slovenia, the place they lived beneath Argentine cowl identities.
By late 2022, Brazilian investigators have been closing in on Shmyrev.
He slipped the nation simply days earlier than the Federal Police unraveled his identification.
Shmyrev had a return ticket dated Feb. 2, 2023. So the brokers obtained arrest warrants and search orders for his addresses. When Shmyrev landed on Brazilian soil, they might be prepared.
However he by no means got here again.
‘What’s Worse Than Being Arrested?’
Shmyrev wasn’t the one Russian spy to slide by means of the Brazilians’ fingers.
Each time the brokers uncovered a reputation, they appeared to have been too late.
A married couple of their 30s, dwelling as Manuel Francisco Steinbruck Pereira and Adriana Carolina Costa Silva Pereira, had decamped to Portugal in 2018 and vanished.
A bunch appeared to be in Uruguay. A lady ostensibly named Maria Luisa Dominguez Cardozo had a Brazilian start certificates and later obtained a Uruguayan passport. And there was one other married couple: Federico Luiz Gonzalez Rodriguez and his spouse, Maria Isabel Moresco Garcia, a blonde spy who posed as a mannequin.
The Brazilian brokers working Operation East had spent numerous hours uncovering the names and nonetheless had no case aside from the false doc cost in opposition to Cherkasov.
However they shared what they’d discovered with the world’s intelligence businesses, whose officers cross-checked that data in opposition to data of identified Russian intelligence operatives. And so they discovered matches, which in some circumstances allowed the Brazilians to connect an actual identify to the faux Brazilian identities.
The couple dwelling in Portugal beneath the identify Pereira, as an illustration, turned out to be truly Vladimir Aleksandrovich Danilov and Yekaterina Leonidovna Danilova, in response to two Western intelligence officers.
Even after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Brazil maintained a pleasant relationship with Moscow. So the Kremlin’s use of Brazilian territory for a large-scale espionage operation was seen as a betrayal. The authorities wished to ship a message.
“We simply put our heads collectively and thought, ‘What’s worse than being arrested as a spy?'” the senior Brazilian investigator stated. “It is being uncovered as a spy.”
To try this, investigators got here up with an thought. They may use Interpol, the world’s largest policing group, to burn Russia’s spies.
Final fall, the Brazilians issued a sequence of Interpol blue notices — alerts searching for data on an individual. The notices circulated the names, pictures and fingerprints of the Russian spies, together with Shmyrev and Cherkasov, to all 196 member nations.
Interpol, as an impartial physique, doesn’t take care of politicized points like espionage. To get round that, the Brazilian authorities stated that the Russians have been being investigated for utilizing fraudulent paperwork.
Uruguay issued comparable alerts, seen by the Occasions, for these suspected of being Russian spies who had turned up there beneath Brazilian identities. Their actual names, intelligence officers stated, have been Roman Olegovich Koval, Irina Alekseyevna Antonova and Olga Igorevna Tyutereva.
Koval and Antonova, the married couple, had all of the sudden left Brazil on a flight to Uruguay in 2023, investigators stated. Tyutereva’s final identified location was Namibia, in response to the senior official.
The Interpol notices don’t embody the actual names, however embody the pictures and different figuring out data. With their identities logged in police databases, and their true names flagged by spy providers, the operatives almost certainly won’t ever be capable to work as overseas spies once more.
Of all of the spies, solely Cherkasov stays in jail. He was convicted of falsifying paperwork and sentenced to fifteen years, however his sentence was lowered to 5 years.
In an obvious gambit to get him house early, the Russian authorities claimed that he was a wished drug seller and filed court docket paperwork asking to have him extradited.
However the Brazilians swiftly countered. If Cherkasov was a drug seller, the prosecutors argued, then it was important that he be held in jail even longer so the police might examine.
He would possibly in any other case have been launched by now. However he stays in a Brasília lockup.
This text initially appeared in The New York Occasions.
