Socialite who charmed Nato staff in Naples was Russian spy, say investigators

The investigators say the woman went by the name of Maria Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera, and told people she met that she was the child of a German father and Peruvian mother, born in the city of Callao, Peru.

In fact, she was a career GRU officer from Russia, according to research by Bellingcat in partnership with a number of media outlets including La Repubblica in Italy and Der Spiegel in Germany, and shared with the Guardian before publication.

Traditionally, illegals have been extremely hard for counterintelligence agencies to find, but in a world of biometric data, facial recognition software and open source investigation possibilities, it has become harder for Russia to keep its illegals below the radar.

Grozev searched for Russian passport numbers in ranges known to have been used by GRU operatives, and found numerous hits. Most had Russian names, but one stood out: Maria Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera.

Two months after her sudden departure from Naples, she posted a Facebook status in Italian, apparently as a way of explaining her disappearance and silence.

In June, the Netherlands deported a man arriving 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 stints studying in Ireland and the US, and was suspected of trying to infiltrate the international criminal court in The Hague.