A team of investigators claims to have uncovered an undercover agent of Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU, who spent a decade posing as a Latin American jewelry designer and hanging out with NATO employees in Naples.
Investigators claim that the woman who introduced herself as Maria Adela Kufelt Rivera and told people that her father is German and her mother Peruvian is actually a GRU agent from Russia. the investigation was carried out by the Bellingket network in partnership with several media outlets including "Republika" in Italy and "Spiegel" in Germany.
Since the early Soviet period, intelligence agencies in Moscow have used agents like Rivera who sometimes lived under false identities in foreign countries for decades, according to the Guardian.
Presenting herself as a Rivera agent, she moved between Rome, Malta and Paris, and around 2013 she settled in Naples, where the NATO command is located. She opened a jewelry store under the name "Serein" and led an active social life."
Her acquaintances say that thanks to her role as secretary in the Naples branch of the international Lions Club, she managed to make friends with many NATO employees. One NATO employee said he had a brief romantic relationship with Rivera.
Traditionally, such agents are difficult to expose, but in the world of biometric data, facial recognition and the possibility of open source investigations, it has become increasingly difficult for Russia to keep spies under the radar, writes the British newspaper.
Kristo Grozev, Bellingket's chief executive and chief investigator, told The Guardian that he first found the GRU undercover agent when he reviewed a leaked database of border crossings maintained by Belarusian border guards, which had been provided by a hacker group opposed to the regime of Alexander Lukashenko.
One NATO employee said he had a brief romantic relationship with Rivera
Grozev searched Russian passport numbers known to be used by GRU operatives, when the name Maria Adela Kufelt Rivera caught his eye. After a closer search, Grozev determined that she was traveling under several Russian passports with serial numbers similar to those used by other GRU operatives. Such a passport was used by the agent charged with the Novichok attack on Bulgarian arms dealer Emilyan Gebrev and another GRU operative allegedly involved in the 2018 attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury.
Grozev also established that on September 15, 2018, Rivera bought a ticket from Naples to Moscow. A day earlier, Bellingkett published an article with his Russian partner "Insider" about two poisoners from Salisbury, under the names Ruslan Boshirov and Aleksandar Petrov, pointing out irregularities in the passport data indicating that they are connected to the security services.
"The Guardian" states that it seems that Rivera was pulled over by her bosses, who feared that other operatives with similar passport numbers could be compromised.
Two months later after her sudden departure from Naples, Rivera tried to explain her sudden disappearance on Facebook in Italian.
"The truth that I finally have to reveal... Hair grows after chemotherapy, it's short but it's there. I miss you all but I'm trying to breathe,” she wrote.
Some GRU agents travel abroad for quick short-term missions and regularly change identities, while others like Rivera spend years under the same false identity.
It is unusual that Rivera traveled under a Russian passport. Her application for Peruvian citizenship was rejected, according to official documents from 2006, and she may have made valuable contacts under that identity that the GRU did not want to lose.
Numerous people who met Rivera claim that she told them that her Peruvian mother took her to the USSR in 1980 and left her there. Over the years, she tried in various ways to get a passport from Western European countries.
Bellingkett stated that he identified the Russian woman behind the fake Rivera identity, based on information and matching photos from various databases and open source research. She did not respond to The Guardian's requests for comment.
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