Investigators say the woman’s name was Maria Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera and she told people she met that she was the child of a German father and a Peruvian mother, born in the city of Callao, Peru. In fact, he was a career GRU officer from Russia, according to a Bellingcat investigation in collaboration with various media outlets, including La Repubblica in Italy and Der Spiegel in Germany, and shared with the Guardian before publication. “Rivera” was what the intelligence community calls an outlaw, a deep-cover agent trained to pose as a foreigner. Moscow’s intelligence services have been using illegals since the early Soviet period. Sometimes, they live with their false identity for decades. Posing as ‘Rivera’, the outlaw moved between Rome, Malta and Paris, eventually settling in Naples, the headquarters of NATO’s Allied Command, around 2013. She founded a jewelery boutique called Serein and led an active social life. Acquaintances said that by taking on the role of secretary at the Naples branch of the international Lions Club, she was able to befriend many NATO staff and other affiliates. A NATO employee told investigators that she had a brief romantic relationship with “Rivera.” Traditionally, counterintelligence agencies have found outlaws extremely difficult to track down, but in a world of biometrics, facial recognition software and open-source investigative capabilities, it has become harder for Russia to keep its outlaws under the radar. “Rivera” (pictured right) took a one-way flight to Moscow the day after Bellingcat published a joint article suggesting that the suspects in the 2018 Salisbury novichok poisoning were GRU agents. Photo: Provided by Bellingcat Christo Grozev, CEO and chief researcher at Bellingcat, said in an interview that he first found traces of a possible GRU outlaw when he was examining a database of leaked border crossings recorded by Belarusian border guards and provided by a group of hackers in opposition. in the regime of Alexander Lukashenko. Grozev looked for Russian passport numbers in areas known to be used by GRU agents and found several hits. Most had Russian names, but one stood out: Maria Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera. Looking more closely at ‘Rivera’, Grozhev found that she traveled with several Russian passports with serial numbers in a range used by other known GRU operatives, including an officer charged with the alleged novichok poisoning of Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev . and another GRU officer allegedly involved in the attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury in 2018. He also discovered that on September 15, 2018, “Rivera” bought a ticket from Naples to Moscow. The day before, Bellingcat and Russian investigative partner Insider published an article about the two Salisbury poisoners, who traveled under the identities of Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov, noting irregularities in their passport data that suggested they had links with security services. It appears that “Rivera” was withdrawn by her bosses, who feared that other operatives with similar passport numbers could be compromised. He does not appear to have left Russia again. Two months after her sudden departure from Naples, she posted a Facebook status in Italian, apparently to explain her disappearance and silence. Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. “It’s the truth I finally have to reveal… Hair is growing back now after chemo, very short but it’s there. I miss everything, but I’m trying to breathe,” she wrote. Some GRU illegals travel abroad only for quick, short-term missions and change identities regularly, while others like “Rivera” spend years inhabiting the same cover identity. In June, the Netherlands deported a man who arrived on a Brazilian passport in the name of Viktor Muller Ferreira, accusing him of being a Russian illegal named Sergey Vladimirovich Cherkasov. He had apparently spent a decade preparing his identity, including studying in Ireland and the US, and was suspected of trying to infiltrate the international criminal court in The Hague. The unusual thing about “Rivera” is that she traveled on a Russian passport, when usually illegals hide their ties to Russia or the Soviet Union. It appears that an earlier attempt to pass “Rivera” as a Peruvian citizen failed: an official Peruvian document from 2006 notes that her citizenship application was rejected as fraudulent. Apparently undeterred by the backlash, the GRU reissued the “Kuhfeldt Rivera” ID with a Russian passport. This was a strange decision, but it is possible that he had already made valuable contacts with this identity and did not want to lose them. Many people who had known “Kuhfeldt Rivera” said she told them her Peruvian mother took her to the Soviet Union in 1980 and left her there. He had apparently tried various routes to obtain a Western European passport over the years. Bellingcat said it had identified the real Russian woman behind the fake “Rivera” persona, based on information and photo matching from various databases and open source research. He did not respond to requests for comment from the Guardian.
