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HomeIndiaRussian spy honey-trapped NATO staff in Naples, sold cheap knock-offs as jewellery:...

Russian spy honey-trapped NATO staff in Naples, sold cheap knock-offs as jewellery: Report

Maria Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera’s lid was blown after her passport numbers were in the range of two other undercover fellow GRU spies.

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New Delhi: She posed as a jewellery designer, Latin American socialite and nightclub owner. Attraction to the good looking Maria Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera was natural. Among her admirers were NATO staff based in Italy’s Naples — one even admitted to having a brief romantic affair.

But one day, Maria left them all unannounced leaving behind a cryptic message that suggested the hurried departure was due to her suffering from cancer. Turns out that was not the case.

Maria aka Olga Kolobova was a Russian spy who successfully charmed her way to infiltrate into the top circles of NATO in Italy, according to a team of online data detectives. Maria had stepped into the shady world of spying way back in 2006.

A joint inquiry by the Netherlands-based investigative group Bellingcat along with media outlets like The Insider in Russia, La Repubblica in Italy and Der Spiegel in Germany that span over 10 months claimed Maria was a GRU “illegal”.

GRU — Russia’s military intelligence agency — has a long-running programme to create ‘illegal’ spies. These agents live under an assumed identity in foreign countries for years and relay sensitive information to their government.

The investigative report comes days after the daughter of a close ally of Russia President Vladimir Putin was killed in a car bomb blast outside Moscow. Russia has accused Ukraine of carrying out the attack that killed Darya Dugina on 20 August.

The deep-cover spy had spun a colourful backstory about how she was a love child of a German father and her Peruvian mother, born in Callao. The mother, who was single-handedly raising her, abandoned her in the erstwhile Soviet Union after travelling to Moscow to attend the Olympic Games in 1980, she had said.

Using that cover, Maria had travelled on several Russian passports moving between Rome, Malta and Paris before eventually settling in Naples, where she accessed the highest echelons of NATO’s Allied Joint Force Command. She managed to get hands on NATO’s on-base photographs, confidential legal files, and databases.

In between her espionage duties, Maria had married a Russian-Ecuadorian man in 2012 but their romance was short lived. The Bellingcat report said that the man had died mysteriously just one year later.

Maria, meanwhile, befriended high-flying individuals while she travelled across Europe while living a double life to carry out her duties. Marcelle D’Argy Smith, a former Cosmopolitan magazine editor, was among those with whom she had come in contact.

It was Maria’s passport that blew away her cover, the report said. Her passport numbers were in the range of two other undercover GRU spies ‘Ruslan Boshirov’ and ‘Alexander Petrov’, who were implicated in the poisoning of British double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in England in 2018.

It is a well-known practice of Russia’s military intelligence agency to furnish their spies with consecutively numbered passports. This, Bellingcat said, has allowed investigative journalists to uncover the spies by “simply tracing such batches of numbers” from “data commonly leaked onto the country’s black market”.

Maria managed to leave Italy for Moscow just one day after the cover of ‘Boshirov’ and ‘Petrov’ were blown and GRU’s “tradecraft” of assigning passport number was published in another investigative report carried by Bellingcat and The Insider in September 2018.


Also Read: From ‘top secret’ to Twitter — How Ukraine war turned global spy agencies into ‘influencers’


Climbed social ladder quickly

During her undercover role, Maria was able to achieve much what she had set out to do. In 2015, she moved to Naples and opened her jewellery boutique. She also became the secretary of a charitable organisation, the Lions Club Napoli Monte Nuovo, that was frequented by members of the NATO command centre.

Her ascent in Naples’ circles as a socialite was quick. She was added to the Lions Club to bring her “vibrant international connection”. It was in this club that Maria reportedly befriended Belgian, Italian and German NATO officers, and had frequent social interactions with them. One NATO employee on the condition of anonymity even admitted to having a brief romantic affair with her, according to the research by Bellingcat.

In reality, her Peruvian descent and jewellery business was a ruse. Maria’s citizen application submitted to the Peruvian civilian registry in 2005 was labelled by the country’s Ministry of Justice as “fraudulent” in an annual budget report to the Congress. It had referred to the case as “a crime against public safety and faith” to the national prosecutor.

The jewellery sold in her boutique, according to the investigative report, were “inexpensive jewellery purchased from Chinese online wholesalers”.

Unsuspecting NATO acquaintances had invited Maria to annual balls, fund-raising dinners and the annual US Marine Corps balls — some even bought jewellery from her store. She also had direct personal access to the officers at Naples (both from NATO and US Navy) and exchanged home visits with them, the report said.

Bellingcat and its investigative partners used facial technology and reverse image techniques after accessing digital footprints left behind by Maria with Olga Kolobova’s social media presence that appeared right after the former’s disappearance.  When the result came, the carefully crafted image was deciphered finally.

In the report, investigators mentioned that they could not establish whether her deployment was terminated even though she was “not caught by foreign counterintelligence service” and whether “GRU perceived her stint in Europe as a success or a failure”.

(Edited by Tony Rai)


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