Artem Shmyrev had everyone fooled. The Russian intelligence officer seemed to have built the perfect cover identity. He ran a successful 3-D printing business and shared an upscale apartment in Rio de Janeiro with his Brazilian girlfriend and a fluffy orange-and-white Maine coon 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. In an audacious and far-reaching operation, the spies shed their Russian pasts. They started businesses, made friends and had love affairs — events that, over many years, became the building blocks of entirely new identities.
Major Russian spy operations have been uncovered in the past, including in the United States in 2010. This was different. 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.
The Russians essentially turned Brazil into an assembly line for deep-cover operatives like Mr. Shmyrev.
One started a jewelry business. Another was a blond, blue-eyed 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 quietly and methodically hunted these spies. Through painstaking police work, these agents discovered a pattern that allowed them to identify the spies, one by one.
Agents have uncovered at least nine Russian officers operating under Brazilian cover identities, according to documents and interviews. Six have never been publicly identified until now. 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.
Dismantling the Kremlin’s spy factory was more than just a routine bit of counterespionage. It was part of the damaging fallout from a decade of Russian aggression. Russian spies helped shoot down a passenger plane en route from Amsterdam in 2014. They interfered in elections in the United States, France and elsewhere. They poisoned perceived enemies and plotted coups.
But it was President Vladimir V. Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022 that galvanized a global response to Russian spies even in parts of the world where those officers had long enjoyed a degree of impunity. Among those countries was Brazil, which historically has had friendly relations with Russia.
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, the same unit that investigated Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, for plotting a coup.
From their modern glass 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, just a few months after Russian troops rolled into Ukraine, the C.I.A. passed an urgent and extraordinary 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 C.I.A. 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 Mr. Cherkasov at the airport. So, for several anxious days, the police kept him under heavy 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. Under questioning, Mr. Cherkasov was cocky, insisting that he was Brazilian. And he had the documents to prove it.
His blue 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 Mr. Cherkasov’s story — and the entire Russian operation in Brazil — began to crumble.
In the past, Russian spies have often obtained identification documents by assuming the identities of dead people, frequently babies.
Not in this case. Victor Muller Ferreira, the agents determined, had never existed at all. Yet he had a real birth certificate.
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.
The discovery raised startling questions. How had a Russian spy obtained genuine documents under a fake name? Most important, the police wondered, if one spy could do it, why couldn’t others?
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.
To find these ghosts, agents began looking for patterns in millions of birth records, passports, driver’s licenses and social security numbers.
Some of that could be automated, but not all Brazilian databases can be easily linked and searched digitally. Much of it had to be done by hand.
That analysis allowed Operation East to unravel the whole Russian operation.
“Everything started with Sergei,” a senior Brazilian official said.
Putin’s Special People
All spies, no matter what country they work for, face the same challenge: creating a fake identity that will stand up to scrutiny.
For generations, undercover operatives used fake passports, stolen names and well-rehearsed cover stories. The digital age, in which nearly everyone has an online history, has made things much more complicated.
This is a particularly acute problem for Russia. That’s because, while all spy services employ undercover operatives, most rely on networks of local informants to do the grunt work of intelligence collection. Russia is unique. Dating back to the earliest years of the Soviet Union, deep-cover officers have committed to a lifetime of service, living and working as completely different people.
Mr. Putin himself has acknowledged overseeing Soviet deep-cover spies while posted in East Germany as a young K.G.B. officer at the end of the Cold War.
“These are special people of a special quality, special convictions and a special character,” he said in a 2017 television interview. “Leaving behind your former life, leaving behind your loved ones and your family, leaving behind your country for many many years to dedicate your life to serving the fatherland, is not something everyone can do. Only the chosen can do it, and I say this without any exaggeration.”
Brazil seemed an ideal place for Mr. Putin’s chosen spies to build their lore. The Brazilian passport is one of the world’s most useful, allowing visa-free travel to nearly as many countries as the American one. Someone with European features and a slight accent is unlikely to stand out in multiethnic Brazil.
And while many countries require verification from a hospital or doctor before issuing birth certificates, Brazil allows a niche exception for those born in rural areas. The authorities will issue a birth certificate to anyone who declares, in the presence of two witnesses, that a baby was born to at least one Brazilian parent.
The system is also decentralized and vulnerable to local corruption.
With a birth certificate in hand, it’s just a matter of applying for voter registration, military papers and, finally, a passport.
Once this is obtained, a spy can go nearly anywhere in the world.
A Break in the Case
One of the first names to surface when investigators started their search was that of Gerhard Daniel Campos Wittich. He seemed to fit the pattern. 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, Mr. 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 American 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?”
The company became a success, a former employee said, winning clients like TV Globo, a television network, and the Brazilian military. (The employee, who asked not to be identified, said that Mr. Shmyrev was never invited onto any bases).
But there were oddities, friends and colleagues said. He never kept his computer connected to the internet when he was not using it. And he seemed to have more money than his business could provide.
He took sudden trips to Europe and Asia, and joked about conducting “industrial espionage” against competitors. He sometimes posed as a customer with other printing companies and once sent one of his employees to intern at a rival business and report back.
He also seemed terrified of cameras and so disliked having his photograph taken that one former employee recalled joking that he might have been “wanted by the Federal Police.”
Mr. Shmyrev panicked when a local newspaper published a photograph of him standing across from Rio’s mayor at the opening of a technology hub, Mr. Martinez recalled.
But only in hindsight did all this seem significant, friends said.
Privately, Mr. Shmyrev was bored and frustrated with undercover life.
“No real achievements in work,” Mr. 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 half a world away in Greece, was unsympathetic. “If you wanted a normal family life, well you have made a fundamentally wrong choice,” she responded.
But she acknowledged that the lives they were leading were not what they had expected.
“Yes, it is not as it was promised and it is bad,” she texted him. “They basically trick ppl into it and I see it as a bad thing. It is dishonest and not constructive.”
The texts are part of a cache of documents that were shared with foreign intelligence services and seen by The New York Times. They were sent in August 2021 and were recovered later from Mr. Shmyrev’s phone. [Read some of the text messages here].
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 Mr. 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 Mr. Shmyrev.
Federal agents had peeled back the Gerhard Daniel Campos Wittich persona and discovered that his mother was dead and had never had a child by that name. His father could not be found.
By late December, the agents were almost certain that they had unearthed a deep-cover Russian spy.
If Mr. Shmyrev was spooked, he gave no indication of it. One afternoon that December, he dined with a colleague in Rio’s trendy Botafogo neighborhood. He seemed relaxed and said he was leaving for a monthlong trip to Malaysia, according to the employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
He slipped the country just days before the Federal Police unraveled his identity. The agents were stunned. All that work, and they had missed him.
Mr. Shmyrev had a return ticket dated Feb. 2, 2023. So the agents obtained arrest warrants and search orders for his addresses. When Mr. Shmyrev landed on Brazilian soil, they would be ready.
But he never came back.
‘What’s Worse Than Being Arrested?’
Mr. 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’ best hope for an arrest seemed, for a time, to be a jeweler named Eric Lopes. The police discovered that he was actually a Russian spy named Aleksandr Utekhin.
His business had been featured in a 2021 Brazilian television program called “Successful Entrepreneurs,” which referred to him as an “expert in precious stones.”
But the presenter said in an interview with The Times that Mr. Lopes had paid for that television spot. Mr. Lopes, she said, was odd. He spoke “gringo Portuguese,” she noted, and refused to go on camera. An employee who went on air on his behalf knew so little about the business that he kept feeding her lines.
“I thought: ‘Wow, is there something going on?’” the presenter added.
When the federal agents arrived at the shops, they found no trace of Mr. Lopes or the gold or gemstones that he had advertised on Instagram.
His shop in Brasília is occupied now by an insurance company. The address in São Paulo, opposite a branch of Brazil’s military police, is home to a real estate company.
Investigators believe that his business existed only as a front to bolster his Brazilian credentials. A Western security official with knowledge of the case said that, after leaving Brazil, Mr. Utekhin had spent some time in the Middle East. His precise location is unknown, though intelligence officials say they think that he and others are back in Russia.
It is unclear if any one event spooked the officers into heading home. But with so much focus on Russia after the Ukraine invasion, intelligence experts said that perhaps the bosses in Moscow concluded that the world had become too dangerous for them.
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 Mr. 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.
Brazil has long maintained neutrality when it comes to geopolitical divisions. 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 audacious idea. They could use Interpol, the world’s largest policing organization, to burn Mr. Putin’s spies.
It was an ironic revenge. Mr. Putin has, for years, manipulated Interpol’s databases to harass dissidents and political opponents.
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 Mr. Shmyrev and Mr. 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.
Mr. Koval and Ms. Antonova, the married couple, had suddenly left Brazil on a flight to Uruguay in 2023, investigators said. Ms. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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.
‘You’re Going to Hear Things About Me’
For a time after leaving Brazil, Mr. Shmyrev checked in regularly with friends and his Brazilian girlfriend. But in early January 2023, his text messages stopped.
“Weeks went by, and we didn’t know what to do,” said Mr. Martinez, his friend.
Mr. Shmyrev’s girlfriend posted to a Facebook group called Brazilians in Kuala Lumpur seeking help in finding him.
“We started like some detective work,” Mr. Martinez said. “We would go online. We called the police stations, the embassies, hotels in Kuala Lumpur, trying to go after him. And we couldn’t find him.”
When Mr. Shmyrev did not take his return flight to Brazil, the police moved in. Agents found that he had left behind several electronic devices that contained crucial personal details, including the texts with his Russian spy wife. He also left $12,000 in cash in his safe.
Those are indications that he had planned to return. As with the others, the questions of what spurred him to leave and what kept him away remain mysteries. Around that time, his Russian wife suddenly left her espionage posting in Greece. She was later outed by Greek authorities.
Despite everything, friends said they miss him.
“Sometimes I think like one day I’m going to go there, to Saint Petersburg,” Mr. Martinez said. “I’m going to be at the counter. I’m going to ask for a vodka. And then, like, he’s going to be on the other side.”
In his fantasy, Mr. Martinez nods at Mr. Shmyrev, and Mr. Shmyrev nods back.
The last known contact Mr. Shmyrev had with Brazil was a phone call to his girlfriend after he had left. As relayed to Mr. Martinez, his friend was sad, perhaps crying.
“You’re going to hear things about me, but you need to know that I never did anything that bad. Like I never killed anyone or something like that,” he said, in Mr. Martinez’s recollection.
“My past caught up with me,” he said.
Rodrigo Pedroso contributed reporting from Sao Paulo. Produced by Gabriel Gianordoli and Rumsey Taylor.
Michael Schwirtz is an investigative reporter with the International desk. With The Times since 2006, he previously covered the countries of the former Soviet Union from Moscow and was a lead reporter on a team that won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for articles about Russian intelligence operations.
Jane Bradley is an investigative reporter on the international desk. She is based in London, where she focuses on abuses of power, national security and crime, and social injustices.
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