Lately federal agents of Brazil has been discreetly unraveling the thread of a Russian network, which used the country as a “spy industry”, according to a New York Times survey published on Wednesday.
More specifically, for years, it seems to have been using the basis for the most selective agents of its secret services, known as “Illegals”.
According to a thorough report by the Times, the spies lived in Latin America’s country for at least seven years and had been fully integrated, maintaining businesses and entering friendships and erotic relationships – events that, over time, constituted the foundations for the creation of their new identities.
Their aim, according to the US newspaper, was not to develop a spy action in Brazil, but to “become Brazilians themselves” and then, with their new identity, to begin developing spy action elsewhere: in the US, Europe and the Middle East.
In the last three years, Brazilian authorities have arranged nine Russian spies operating with Brazilian identities – with six of them not publicly released until Wednesday.
Agentstvo, an independent Russian news agency research, described the fact as “one of the greatest failures of Russian intelligence services”.
Why Brazil?
Speaking to the US NPR network, Times journalist James Bradley explained that there were three reasons that made Brazil an attractive destination for the Russian espionage network. The first is that the country itself consists of a multicultural, diverse population and is therefore easy for anyone to integrate. Secondly, Brazilian passports are one of the most useful and powerful in the world, as one can enter many visa countries. Finally, the most important reason, according to the journalist, is the Brazilian identification system. The way you acquire a birth certificate has essentially a “window” that facilitates the application and acquisition compared to most other countries.
The man who led to the revelation
The thread began to unfold in April 2022, two months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when the CIA alerted Brazilian federal police to Victor Moler Ferreira, with real name Sergei Cherkasov. At that time, he did his master’s degree at Johns Hopkins University in Washington in 2018, while starting his internship at the International Criminal Court in The Hague – while investigation into Russian war crimes in Ukraine was going to begin.
Building Brazilian identity
He had spent about eight years in Brazil building his identity, but when he arrived in the Netherlands, the Dutch authorities denied his entry and sent him back to Sao Paulo. There, after checking, his passport and identity were found “clean”, but he was betrayed by his birth certificate. The woman referred to as his mother, according to her relative, had died and never had children, and his father appears to have never existed.
Along with the story of Cherkasov-who is currently serving a five-year prison sentence in Brazil for falsification of documents-the entire Russian operation began to collapse. The Brazilian authorities then began looking for other so -called “ghosts” as part of a study entitled “Operation East”.
Although they have already identified and revealed nine of them, Cherkasov is the only one who has been convicted in Brazil. “The rest, in fact, simply slipped through the hands of Brazilian police as they were investigating them,” Bradley said. It is estimated that everyone is now back in Russia.
