What We Learn From the Rollup of Russian Illegals in Brazil
The New York Times has a story this morning about Brazil dismantling a network of Russian Illegals, what Americans call “non-official cover” (NOC) operatives, i.e., spies who do not operate out of the Embassy posing as diplomats.
In “early April 2022”, about six weeks after Russia launched the full-scale invasion to eliminate Ukraine, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) tipped off Brazil’s Federal Police that one of its passport-holders, Victor Muller Ferreira, a graduate of the U.S.’s Johns Hopkins University who was applying for an internship at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Netherlands, was an officer of Russian military intelligence (GRU) named Sergey Cherkasov. This was duly passed on to the Dutch: Cherkasov was denied entry and sent back to Brazil. The Brazilians did not have grounds to immediately detain Cherkasov, so kept him under surveillance for a few days, before picking him up on a charge of using fraudulent documents.
As it turned out, even prosecuting Cherkasov for fraud was more of a challenge than anybody expected. His passport was authentic, as was his voter registration card and certificate showing he had completed compulsory military service. Cherkasov’s Brazilian birth certificate in the name of Ferreira, saying he had been born in Rio de Janeiro in 1989, was also genuine. Nonetheless, it was the birth certificate which provided the break. The listed father could not be found in Brazil’s records, and though the Brazilian mother of Ferreira, who died in 1993, was real enough, she had never had any children, according to her family.
Finding out how Cherkasov had created his legend (false backstory) was the easy part. From the Times:
[W]hile many countries require verification from a hospital or doctor before issuing birth certificates, Brazil allows a niche exception for those born in rural areas. The authorities will issue a birth certificate to anyone who declares, in the presence of two witnesses, that a baby was born to at least one Brazilian parent. The system is also decentralized and vulnerable to local corruption. With a birth certificate in hand, it’s just a matter of applying for voter registration, military papers and, finally, a passport.
In addition to this bureaucratic loophole, Illegals have the social advantage of Brazil’s diversity: “Someone with European features and a slight accent is unlikely to stand out in multiethnic Brazil.”
It was obvious Cherkasov was not alone in exploiting these gaps in Brazil, but finding his collaborators was laborious: much of the State documentation is not digitised, so had to be examined by hand. Working through the records, Operation EAST, as Brazil dubbed its investigation, was able, with some help from Western intelligence agencies (including the U.S., Israel, the Netherlands, and Uruguay), to detect a pattern that uncovered at least nine Illegals.
One of the first names flagged by the EAST operation was Gerhard Daniel Campos Wittich, to all appearances an average 34-year-old middle-class Brazilian citizen who “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.” The only thing even vaguely out of the ordinary was the slight accent to Wittich’s otherwise-perfect Portuguese, the result of a childhood spent in Austria, he said. On closer examination, Wittich, ostensibly born in Rio in 1986, “seemed to have appeared out of nowhere in 2015.” As Brazil was on the cusp of working out, in December 2022, that Wittich was a Russian intelligence officer named Artem Shmyrev,1 he left the country and—despite purchasing a return ticket—never came back. The escape of the spies in Brazil was to be a recurring theme,2 but there was some more success abroad, where Brazil’s investigation led to the roundup of Mikhail Mikushin in Norway, and Artyom Dultsev and Anna Dultseva in Slovenia.
It transpired that Russia had chosen Brazil to be what the Times calls a “factory” to prepare its Illegals, cultivating their legends and positioning deep-cover sleeper operatives advantageously for the moment the Kremlin needs to activate them.
Cherkasov is the only one of the Russian Illegals still in prison in Brazil, convicted for falsifying documents, not espionage.3 The lack of arrests by Brazil might not be coincidental, since counter-espionage does not appear to have been the point of the EAST exercise. Brazil has always maintained friendly relations with Moscow, before and after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, under the authoritarian populist President Jair Bolsonaro (r. 2019-23) and the corrupt Leftist Lula (r. 2003-11, 2023-present). For Brazil’s government, the activities of the Illegals per se were less the source of outrage than the perceived betrayal by Russia they represented.
What Brazil wanted was to send a political message to Vladimir Putin, and in deciding how to do that, according to a “senior Brazilian investigator”, the consideration was, “What’s worse than being arrested as a spy? It’s being exposed as a spy.” Late last year, Brazil filed Interpol “blue notices”—“seeking information on a person”—about all the Illegals: disseminating their names, photographs, and fingerprints to the 196 Member States. The Brazilians apparently liked the irony of burning the Russian network via Interpol, which Putin long ago transformed into a weapon for harassing political opponents and other State enemies.4
Perhaps the most interesting part of the story is the light the captured personal messages of Artem Shmyreva shed on the life of a Russian Illegal. Artem’s existence does not seem to have been a happy one: in a series of messages (in English) to his wife, Irina Shmyreva, an Illegal based in Greece, Artem complained about day-to-day problems, like having no money, and more profound issues of demoralisation, his lack of a sense of accomplishment, and feeling like a “loser”. Irina, made of sterner stuff, told him to pull himself together. “Everyone has problems”, Irina noted. “If you wanted a normal family life, well you have made fundamentally the wrong choice.” Even Irina was willing to grant, however, that their work “is not as it was promised and it is bad—they basically trick ppl into it and I see it as a bad thing.”
The messages between the Shmyrevas show that, far from the glamour that might be conjured up by the phrases “deep-cover spy” or “sleeper agent”, the life of an Illegal in the phase of their life-cycle they were in in Brazil is one of daily drudgery, social isolation, and a frustration born of waiting for the “real” work to begin. Irina writes at one point of enrolling in an academic course to spy on some American students. It is a snapshot of the kinds of things Russian Illegals do in the legend-building phase of their job. It is instructive when Artem presses Irina to write more reports to the Centre about what she is doing. If she “describe[s] it nice” and presents it “as a result …, then it is one”. At a minimum, it will show the effort she is putting in, Artem says. (Irina had apparently been “translating websites [and] creating online advertising campaigns” as well, according to the Times.) Equally instructive is Irina’s dismissive reply, “What do they care about a bunch of American students[?]”
On the one hand, it is impossible not to notice the decline from the Soviet “Great Illegals” of the 1930s. The activities of Shmyreva and the others seem so trivial next to titanic figures like Arnold Deutsch, the recruiter of the “Magnificent Five” (Cambridge spies);5 Richard Sorge, who contributed to saving Moscow from the Nazis in 1941 by telling Stalin it was safe to pull troops from the Far East as Japan was not going to open a second front; and Dmitri Bystrolyotov, whose flamboyant antics covered for infiltrating elites and unlocking ciphers all over Europe. It is unfair to make the comparison in one way, the Brazil Illegals not having reached the phase of “real” work, and that is without factoring in the changes in technology, State capacity, and the rest of it that have made life in the shadows much more difficult. All the same, a like-with-like comparison can be made on two points.
First, motivation. The Great Illegals believed they were ushering mankind into a utopian future, holding to Communism with a zeal that in the modern world is only seen with jihadists. These men and women worked for the Cause. The Shmyrevas speak of their task as a career—filing paperwork, seeking management’s approval, and promotion.
Second, quality. The Great Illegals were intimidatingly intellectually gifted. The Cheka in the 1930s, the spearhead of a Soviet State with its myth-image of a workers’ paradise still intact, attracted the best of the best, in the West and at home, where the cultural capital of the Tsardom—the educational standards, critical thinking, fluency with languages, knowledge of varied political ideas—still lingered. Total rigidity in practice, and the fear of being shot for taking initiative and not waiting for the Centre’s micromanaging orders, had not set in yet.6 The bloodshed of Yezhovshchina and the calamity of the war Stalin started alongside Hitler destroyed the final vestiges of the old world, enabling a more total societal imposition of Communism, with a corresponding reduction in the abilities of recruits.7 The Communist mission in a theological sense was adjourned in 1991, but Russia barely had a chance to start repairing the damage Bolshevism did before the old elite retook power, reinstituting the patterns of rule and habits of mind that stultified Soviet society and the functioning of its institutions, including the intelligence services.
On the other hand, it is important that cognisance of the limitations of modern Russia does not lead to underestimating its capabilities—or intentions. The press largely laughed-off the dismantling of the Russian Illegals network in the U.S. in 2010,8 and one can imagine a similar reaction to the Brazil story, with a focus on the absurdity and incompetence. This would be to miss the point woefully. The lesson from Brazil is that Russia continues operating the most well-resourced and sophisticated Illegals program on earth, and this is part of a State structure where intelligence has been integrated as a force-multiplier towards policy and strategic objectives that likewise has few if any peers. Given the condition of Western counter-intelligence, there is no room for complacency.
NOTES
The Times says that Cherkasov was identified by the CIA as “an undercover officer in Russia’s military intelligence service” (i.e., GRU). The article is unclear which service Shmyrev worked for, and in a separate piece suggests Shmyrev was an operative of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), a competitor with GRU, which also runs an Illegals program.
The SVR regards itself as the main successor to the KGB, and in a sense it is. The most celebrated KGB operations within the Chekist milieu, and those most infamous abroad, were carried out by the external department of the KGB, the First Chief Directorate (FCD), and many involved Illegals. After the Soviet collapse, the FCD was detached, made an independent agency, and reflagged as the SVR.
What complicates the SVR narrative in historical terms is that the KGB’s domestic secret police mission, the sine qua non of the Soviet Revolution’s survival, was inherited in the Russian Federation by the Federal Security Service (FSB). The official SVR historiography, however, squares this circle by having it both ways: it claims the KGB mantle, while disclaiming any historical responsibility for the Cheka’s domestic repression, symbolised above all in Yezhovshchina. This is false even on its own terms—the KGB (NKVD as it then-was) murdered Soviet dissidents all around the world in the 1930s—but this version of events is powerfully believed by the SVR’s cadres.
The FSB has not completely eschewed the use of Illegals, but the FSB’s foreign activities tend to be limited to the “near abroad”—notably Ukraine and Georgia—and there is little evidence the FSB has been involved in cultivating the kind of long-term, deep-cover operatives typically implied by the use of the term “Illegals”.
A purported married couple, Manuel Francisco Steinbruck Pereira and Adriana Carolina Costa Silva Pereira, unmasked as Illegals by Operation EAST, had already fled Brazil, leaving in 2018 to Portugal, where they vanished, according to the Times.
After the EAST operation began, a woman living under the Brazilian birth certificate of Maria Luisa Dominguez Cardozo obtained a Uruguayan passport and also disappeared. In 2023, Roman Olegovich Koval and Irina Alekseyevna Antonova, who presented themselves as a married couple, abruptly left Brazil and went to Uruguay. And Uruguay was also the refuge for Federico Luiz Gonzalez Rodriguez and Maria Isabel Moresco Garcia, another ostensible husband-and-wife pair. In something of an echo of Anna Chapman, whose looks occupied a lot of the press space devoted to the rollup of the SVR Illegals network in the U.S. in 2010, Ms. Garcia had been, says the Times, “a blonde spy who posed as a model”. A lady calling herself Olga Igorevna Tyutereva was last heard of in Namibia.
The case that gave some in the Brazilian security forces the most hope of an arrest for some time was Eric Lopes, a jeweller whose real name was discovered to be Aleksandr Utekhin. Lopes/Utekhin had been “featured in a 2021 Brazilian television program called ‘Successful Entrepreneurs,’ which referred to him as an ‘expert in precious stones’.” The Times interviewed the presenter, who confessed that she had wondered at the time if something was afoot. For a start, “Lopes” spoke “gringo Portuguese”, which was a bit strange for a born-and-bred Brazilian. There were other little things, like the fact he had paid for the television spot and then refused to appear on camera. Then there was the “employee” Lopes deputised to the on-camera portions of the show, who—a detail only really salient in retrospect—was so utterly bewildered by what Lopes’s business actually was or did that he had to feed her all her lines. Brazil’s Federal Police “found no trace of Mr. Lopes or the gold or gemstones that he had advertised on Instagram” when they arrived at his shops in Brasília and São Paulo. The Brasília shop was occupied by an insurance company and the São Paulo shop, located “opposite a branch of Brazil’s military police”, was the office of a real estate company.
In the compliment that vice pays to virtue, Cherkasov might well be out of prison by now, his initial fifteen-year sentence having been reduced to five, but Russia tried to get him home early by filing an extradition request claiming he was a wanted drug dealer, and the Brazilians responded that if this was so “then it was essential that he be held in prison even longer so the police could investigate”.
As the Times notes, “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.”
The Magnificent Five were: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross. The first three were recruited in 1934, and the other two in 1937.
Bystrolyotov was technically an Illegal agent not an officer, for example, and Deutsch was foreign-born. Fluidity of this kind was not just in categorisations. Deutsch recruited Guy Burgess, an open homosexual when that was a dangerous thing to be and in general a reckless man. On paper, Burgess was not agent material, but Deutsch had the ability to see that this would assist Burgess’s cover, and the freedom to act upon his judgment—neither of which would be true a decade later.
When the Soviets tried to revive the Illegals program around 1950, the number of people who could understand the West—who could pass as Western and interpret the intelligence they collected—was immensely reduced. By that time, the majority of Soviet citizens had only known Communism, with its conspiratorial vision of the West, and on top of that stifling uniformity of thought was the danger of telling Stalin something he did not want to hear. The Soviets continued running rings round Western spy services in collection, but most political intelligence was wasted in the Soviet Union. Soviet intelligence became a mechanism for reinforcing the leadership’s beliefs, rather than supplying them with information. When the next attempt to recapture the glory of the Great Illegals was made in the 1970s, the Soviet myth-image had faded; the Communist true-believers available were a drastically diminished cadre.
Much of the press coverage focused on the aesthetics of Anna Chapman.