The Spy FactoryRussia’s intelligence services turned Brazil into an assembly line for deep-cover operatives. A team of federal agents from the South American country has been quietly dismantling it.
By Michael Schwirtz and Jane BradleyIllustrations by Lucy JonesPhotographs and Video by Dado Galdieri
Michael Schwirtz and Jane Bradley have covered Russian operations in the West for a decade. They reported this story from across Brazil, the United States and several countries in Europe.
May 21, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET
Artem Shmyrev had everyone fooled. The Russian intelligence officer seemed to have built the perfect cover identity. He 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.
But most important, he had an authentic birth certificate and passport that cemented his alias as Gerhard Daniel Campos Wittich, a 34-year-old Brazilian citizen.
After six years lying low, he was impatient to begin real spy work.
“No one wants to feel loser,” he wrote in a 2021 text message to his Russian wife, who was also an intelligence officer, using imperfect English. “That is why I continue working and hoping.”
He was not alone. For years, a New York Times investigation found, Russia used Brazil as a launchpad for its most elite intelligence officers, known as illegals. In an audacious and far-reaching operation, the spies shed their Russian pasts. They started businesses, made friends and had love affairs — events that, over many years, became the building blocks of entirely new identities.
Major Russian spy operations have been uncovered in the past, including in the United States in 2010. This was different. The goal was not to spy on Brazil, but to become Brazilian. Once cloaked in credible back stories, they would set off for the United States, Europe or the Middle East and begin working in earnest.
The Russians essentially turned Brazil into an assembly line for deep-cover operatives like Mr. Shmyrev.
One started a jewelry business. Another was a blond, blue-eyed model. A third was admitted into an American university. There was a Brazilian researcher who landed work in Norway, and a married couple who eventually went to Portugal.
Then it all came crashing down.
Six of the Russian spies, clockwise from top left; Yekaterina Leonidovna Danilova, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Danilov, Olga Igorevna Tyutereva, Aleksandr Andreyevich Utekhin, Irina Alekseyevna Antonova and Roman Olegovich Koval.
For the past three years, Brazilian counterintelligence agents have quietly and methodically hunted these spies. Through painstaking police work, these agents discovered a pattern that allowed them to identify the spies, one by one.
Agents have uncovered at least nine Russian officers operating under Brazilian cover identities, according to documents and interviews. Six have never been publicly identified until now. The investigation has already spanned at least eight countries, officials said, with intelligence coming from the United States, Israel, the Netherlands, Uruguay and other Western security services.
Using hundreds of investigative documents and interviews with dozens of police and intelligence officials across three continents, The Times pieced together details of the Russian spy operation in Brazil and the secretive effort to take it out.
Dismantling the Kremlin’s spy factory was more than just a routine bit of counterespionage. It was part of the damaging fallout from a decade of Russian aggression. Russian spies helped shoot down a passenger plane en route from Amsterdam in 2014. They interfered in elections in the United States, France and elsewhere. They poisoned perceived enemies and plotted coups.
But it was President Vladimir V. Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022 that galvanized a global response to Russian spies even in parts of the world where those officers had long enjoyed a degree of impunity. Among those countries was Brazil, which historically has had friendly relations with Russia.
Brazil’s investigation dealt a devastating blow to Moscow’s illegals program. It eliminated a cadre of highly trained officers who will be difficult to replace. At least two were arrested. Others beat a hasty retreat to Russia. With their covers blown, they will most likely never work abroad again.
At the heart of this extraordinary defeat was a team of counterintelligence agents from the Brazilian Federal Police, the same unit that investigated Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, for plotting a coup.
From their modern glass headquarters in the capital, Brasília, they spent years combing through millions of Brazilian identity records, looking for patterns.
It became known as Operation East.
Ghosts in the SystemIn early April 2022, just a few months after Russian troops rolled into Ukraine, the C.I.A. passed an urgent and extraordinary message to Brazil’s Federal Police.
The Americans reported that an undercover officer in Russia’s military intelligence service had recently turned up in the Netherlands to take an internship with the International Criminal Court — just as it began to investigate Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
The would-be intern was traveling on a Brazilian passport under the name Victor Muller Ferreira. He’d received a graduate degree from Johns Hopkins University under that name. But his real name, the C.I.A. said, was Sergey Cherkasov. Dutch border officials had denied him entry, and he was now on a plane to São Paulo.
With limited evidence and only hours to act, the Brazilians had no authority to arrest Mr. Cherkasov at the airport. So, for several anxious days, the police kept him under heavy surveillance while he remained free at a São Paulo hotel.
Finally, the officers got a warrant and arrested him — not for espionage, but on the more modest charge of using fraudulent documents.
Even that turned out to be a much harder case to make than anyone expected. Under questioning, Mr. Cherkasov was cocky, insisting that he was Brazilian. And he had the documents to prove it.
His blue Brazilian passport was authentic. He had a Brazilian voter registration card as required by law and a certificate showing that he had completed compulsory military service.
All were genuine.
“There was no link between him and great Mother Russia,” said an investigator at the Federal Police, who spoke, as did others, on condition of anonymity because the investigation is still open.
It was only when the police found his birth certificate that Mr. Cherkasov’s story — and the entire Russian operation in Brazil — began to crumble.
In the past, Russian spies have often obtained identification documents by assuming the identities of dead people, frequently babies.
Not in this case. Victor Muller Ferreira, the agents determined, had never existed at all. Yet he had a real birth certificate.
The document indicated that Victor Muller Ferreira had been born in Rio de Janeiro in 1989 to a Brazilian mother, a real person who had died four years later.
But when the police located her family, agents learned that the woman had never had a child. The authorities never found anyone matching the father’s name.
The discovery raised startling questions. How had a Russian spy obtained genuine documents under a fake name? Most important, the police wondered, if one spy could do it, why couldn’t others?
Federal agents began searching for what they called “ghosts”: people with legitimate birth certificates, who spent their lives without any record of actually being in Brazil and who appeared suddenly as adults rapidly collecting identity documents.
To find these ghosts, agents began looking for patterns in millions of birth records, passports, driver’s licenses and social security numbers.
Some of that could be automated, but not all Brazilian databases can be easily linked and searched digitally. Much of it had to be done by hand.
That analysis allowed Operation East to unravel the whole Russian operation.
“Everything started with Sergei,” a senior Brazilian official said.
...
continua!
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/21/world/americas/russia-brazil-spies-deep-cover.html
