- Apr 14, 2001
- 55,842
- 13,937
- 146
Though not talked about much, the GRU has been working overtime in espinoge against the west. Here is an interesting story:
No paywall
No paywall
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His real name is Sergey Cherkasov and he had spent nearly a decade building the fictitious Ferreira persona, according to officials and court records. His “team” was a tight circle of Russian handlers suddenly poised to have a deep-cover spy in the U.S. capital, positioned to forge connections in every corner of the American security establishment, from the State Department to the CIA.
Using the access he gained during his two years in Washington, Cherkasov filed reports to his bosses in Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, on how senior officials in the Biden administration were responding to the Russian military buildup before the war in Ukraine, according to an FBI affidavit.
After he graduated, he came close to achieving a more consequential penetration when he was offered a position at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. He was due to start a six-month internship there last year — just as the court began investigating Russian war crimes in Ukraine — only to be turned away by Dutch authorities acting on information relayed by the FBI, according to Western security officials. Officials in the Netherlands put him on a plane back to Brazil, where he was arrested upon landing and is now serving a 15-year prison sentence for document fraud related to his fake identity.
The details that have since emerged provide extraordinary visibility into highly cloaked aspects of Russian intelligence, including the Kremlin’s almost obsessive effort to infiltrate Western targets with “illegals” — spies who operate as lone agents with no discernible link to their home service — rather than diplomats with the legal protections that come with working out of an embassy.
The best part of the story is how for all these years he kept his fully detailed (and flawed) cover story on his computer.One of the more bizarre pieces of evidence to emerge in the case is a rambling four-page document found on Cherkasov’s computer that is written in Portuguese and reads like the notes of an actor trying to familiarize himself with a part.
“I am Victor Muller Ferreira,” it begins, before unspooling a contrived hard-luck story sprinkled with random details. He describes his aversion to the smell of fish near a bridge in Rio de Janeiro, and a pinup poster of Pamela Anderson in a mechanic’s shop where he supposedly worked.
Other passages seem to anticipate suspicion about his blond hair and puzzling accent, rehearsing ways to deflect such attention by claiming German ancestry and long stretches out of the country during which his Portuguese skills declined.
“My fellow pupils often used to joke about my looks and my accent,” it says about his days at schools he never truly attended. “They called me ‘beloved patriot.’ That is why I did not have many friends.”
On its own, the clunky script reflects a lack of professional polish. The fact that he was still carrying it with him on a laptop a decade later, according to the FBI affidavit, is a startling breach of operational security.
In some ways, shoddy discipline has become a signature of Cherkasov’s alleged employer. In recent years, GRU operatives have seemed to make little effort to cover their tracks in brazen operations including the hacking of Democratic National Committee computers in 2015, the poisoning of Russian defector and former spy Sergei Skripal in England in 2018, and the attempted assassination of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny nearly three years ago.
Despite the tradecraft lapses, Cherkasov made remarkably swift progress toward his goal of infiltrating Western institutions.
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