The mother of all spy factories begins to unravel as cops in Brazil uncover long-hidden trails

Artem Shmyrev had everyone fooled. The Russian intelligence officer seemed to have built the perfect cover identity. He ran a successful 3D printing business and shared an upscale apartment in Rio de Janeiro with his Brazilian girlfriend and a 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. The spies shed their Russian pasts. They started businesses, made friends and had love affairs -- the building blocks of entirely new identities.

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.

One deep-cover operative started a jewelry business. Another was a 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.

For the past three years, Brazilian counterintelligence agents have uncovered at least nine Russian officers operating under Brazilian cover identities, according to documents and interviews. 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.

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.

From their 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 System
In early April 2022, the CIA passed an urgent 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 CIA 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 Cherkasov at the airport. So, for several days, the police kept him under 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.

Cherkasov's 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 Cherkasov's story -- and the entire Russian operation in Brazil -- began to crumble.

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.

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.

Agents began looking for patterns in millions of birth records, passports, driver's licenses and social security numbers.

That analysis allowed Operation East to unravel the whole Russian operation.

"Everything started with Sergey," a senior Brazilian official said.

A Break in the Case
One of the first names to surface when investigators started their search was that of Gerhard Daniel Campos Wittich. His birth certificate indicated that he was born in Rio in 1986, but he seemed to have appeared out of nowhere in 2015.

By the time agents began investigating, Shmyrev had built a cover identity so convincing that even his own girlfriend and colleagues had no clue. He spoke perfect Portuguese, tinged with an accent that he explained was the result of a childhood spent in Austria.

He seemed to pour everything he had into his printing company, 3D Rio, which he built from scratch and appeared genuinely to care about, according to former colleagues. He spent long hours at work on the 16th floor of a high-rise in central Rio, a block away from the U.S. Consulate. Sometimes he sent employees home so he could work alone.

"He was a work addict," said Felipe Martinez, a former client who befriended the Russian he knew as Daniel. "He thought big, you know?"

Privately, Shmyrev was bored and frustrated with undercover life.

"No real achievements in work," Shmyrev wrote in one text message to his wife. "I am not where I have to be for 2 years already."

His wife, Irina Shmyreva, another Russian spy texting from Greece, was unsympathetic. "If you wanted a normal family life, well you have made a fundamentally wrong choice," she responded.

The texts are part of a cache of documents that were shared with foreign intelligence services and seen by the Times. They were sent in August 2021 and were recovered later from Shmyrev's phone.

Six months later, Russia invaded Ukraine. Suddenly, intelligence services around the world were working together and making it a priority to disrupt Kremlin espionage. The lives of Russian spies deployed worldwide were thrown into upheaval.

First came Cherkasov, the intern who was arrested weeks after the invasion. Then Mikhail Mikushin, who had been under Brazilian investigation, turned up in Norway and was arrested. Two Russian deep-cover operatives were arrested in Slovenia, where they lived under Argentine cover identities.

By late 2022, Brazilian investigators were closing in on Shmyrev.

He slipped the country just days before the Federal Police unraveled his identity.

Shmyrev had a return ticket dated Feb. 2, 2023. So the agents obtained arrest warrants and search orders for his addresses. When Shmyrev landed on Brazilian soil, they would be ready.

But he never came back.

'What's Worse Than Being Arrested?'
Shmyrev wasn't the only Russian spy to slip through the Brazilians' fingers.

Every time the agents uncovered a name, they seemed to have been too late.

A married couple in their 30s, living as Manuel Francisco Steinbruck Pereira and Adriana Carolina Costa Silva Pereira, had decamped to Portugal in 2018 and vanished.

A bunch seemed to be in Uruguay. A woman ostensibly named Maria Luisa Dominguez Cardozo had a Brazilian birth certificate and later obtained a Uruguayan passport. And there was another married couple: Federico Luiz Gonzalez Rodriguez and his wife, Maria Isabel Moresco Garcia, a blonde spy who posed as a model.

The Brazilian agents running Operation East had spent countless hours uncovering the names and still had no case except for the false document charge against Cherkasov.

But they shared what they had learned with the world's intelligence agencies, whose officers cross-checked that information against records of known Russian intelligence operatives. And they found matches, which in some cases allowed the Brazilians to attach a real name to the fake Brazilian identities.

The couple living in Portugal under the name Pereira, for instance, turned out to be actually Vladimir Aleksandrovich Danilov and Yekaterina Leonidovna Danilova, according to two Western intelligence officials.

Even after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Brazil maintained a friendly relationship with Moscow. So the Kremlin's use of Brazilian territory for a large-scale espionage operation was seen as a betrayal. The authorities wanted to send a message.

"We just put our heads together and thought, 'What's worse than being arrested as a spy?'" the senior Brazilian investigator said. "It's being exposed as a spy."

To do that, investigators came up with an idea. They could use Interpol, the world's largest policing organization, to burn Russia's spies.

Last fall, the Brazilians issued a series of Interpol blue notices -- alerts seeking information on a person. The notices circulated the names, photographs and fingerprints of the Russian spies, including Shmyrev and Cherkasov, to all 196 member countries.

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.

Uruguay issued similar alerts, seen by the Times, for those suspected of being Russian spies who had turned up there under Brazilian identities. Their real names, intelligence officials said, were Roman Olegovich Koval, Irina Alekseyevna Antonova and Olga Igorevna Tyutereva.

Koval and Antonova, the married couple, had suddenly left Brazil on a flight to Uruguay in 2023, investigators said. Tyutereva's last known location was Namibia, according to the senior official.

The Interpol notices do not include the real names, but include the photographs and other identifying information. With their identities logged in police databases, and their true names flagged by spy services, the operatives most likely will never be able to work as foreign spies again.

Of all the spies, only Cherkasov remains in prison. He was convicted of falsifying documents and sentenced to 15 years, but his sentence was reduced to five years.

In an apparent gambit to get him home early, the Russian government claimed that he was a wanted drug dealer and filed court documents asking to have him extradited.

But the Brazilians swiftly countered. If Cherkasov was a drug dealer, the prosecutors argued, then it was essential that he be held in prison even longer so the police could investigate.

He might otherwise have been released by now. But he remains in a Brasília lockup.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.