True Spies Debriefs: Jane Bradley and Michael Schwirtz on Russia's Brazilian Illegals
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Join now at plus.spyscape.com. Hello Spyscape Plus subscribers and welcome to the True Spies debrief. I'm Frank Palmer, one of the producers of True Spies, and you're about to hear my conversation with Michael Schwartz and Jane Bradley, two formidable New York Times journalists who've just uncovered one hell of an espionage story, one that's been bubbling away for the last couple of years right underneath our noses.

I don't want to give too much away, but it all has to do with a top-secret Russian espionage program that's been routed through Brazil, where federal police have uncovered a series of deep-cover agents with impossibly perfect documentation. According to Jane and Michael, Russia has been using Brazil as a fully-fledged spy factory for a number of years, a place to build watertight legends for prized illegals before deploying them to missions all over the world.

What follows is a fascinating blow-by-blow of the still ongoing investigation into this bizarre phenomenon, a story that began when Brazil's federal police received a tip from the CIA all the way back in 2022.

Yeah, so for the Brazilians, the investigation started with a tick from the CIA. And they said that there was a suspected Russian spy on his way back to Sao Paulo. And this is the first guy, a guy called Sergei Chekhov, who went by the alias Victor Muller-Feyera. And they said, look, we've just turned him back from the Netherlands and he's on a plane back to Sao Paulo now. We believe he's a Russian spy. So the Brazilians got this pretty

pretty extraordinary tip out the blue. They had just hours to kind of get an arrest warrant ready for him to arrest him when he landed. And they kind of raced about trying to get a warrant not for espionage at this stage, but for falsifying ID documents. But, you know, it was such a sudden and unexpected tip that they basically weren't ready. So when

Chekhozov arrived at Sao Paulo airport. They didn't have the warrant from the judge yet. So they effectively, they asked him a few questions. He insisted he was Brazilian and who he said he was. He was victim of La Fiala. And they had to let him go, which was obviously a very anxious time for them. So they kept him under heavy surveillance for a few days at this hotel in Sao Paulo, where they went back to the judge with more evidence to try and get evidence.

this arrest warrant. And then they did eventually manage to arrest him and question him for days. And he's initially pretty cocky, right? Like his story ostensibly checks out.

He sort of remained cocky for a long time. One thing that didn't make it into the story, there are these messages he would send a girlfriend outside of prison, a Brazilian girlfriend, in English, he would write to her. It's funny, all of them seem to communicate with each other in English. And he would tell her, you know, I'm only going to be in here for a few days, and then I'm only going to be here a few weeks. And sort of initially, he insisted to the Brazilian authorities, I'm just Brazilian. I don't know what you're talking about.

And the Brazilian authorities didn't have much to go on initially because he had all of his documents in order. He had a passport showing that he was a Brazilian citizen. He had a driver's license. He had military conscription records. He had voter registration records. Everything that a Brazilian should have to be a Brazilian, he had, including a birth certificate showing that he had been born in...

In Rio in 1989. And initially, Brazilian authorities were stumped because they'd gotten this pretty solid tip from the CIA. This guy is not a Brazilian. He's a Russian spy. And it was only when they started digging into the birth certificate, which included the names of Victor Mueller Ferreira's parents, that they...

discovered a hole in his story because when they went looking for the parents, one, they couldn't find his father. And two, when they found the family of his mother, who was a real person, the family told them, in fact, first of all, the woman named his mother had died shortly after supposedly giving birth, a few years after supposedly giving birth to him. And the woman's family said she had never had a child. And so that's when they knew they were onto something.

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It seems like this might be a good moment to give some kind of wider context. Obviously, Russia has this very kind of storied history of their illegal program, going right back to the earliest days of the Bolshevik Revolution, I believe. For those who aren't familiar with the history of that illegals program, can you just kind of explain a bit more about that? Yeah, you're right. The practice of the illegals program dates back to the earliest days.

days of the Soviet Union. This is in part because initially the Soviet Union wasn't recognized abroad by very many countries. And so they did not have an embassy. And an embassy is where you sort of house your spies traditionally. And so the Soviet Union developed this practice of sending its spies illegally into other countries, impersonating other people. And this evolved into a pretty unique practice in the world that continues to this day of

preparing spies basically to live their covers. And what most foreign intelligence services do, particularly foreign intelligence services in the West, they will have undercover operatives, undercover officers. The CIA has people working undercover and embassies and elsewhere. But they will be undercover as, you know, American businessmen or American academics, perhaps. They would have some sort of believable cover, but they wouldn't try to pretend undercover.

to be anything but American, most likely. What the Russians do, they take it a big step further in that they try to prepare their people to actually live as other nationalities. And so in this case, the spies that we find in Brazil are in Brazil not to spy on Brazil. They're in Brazil in order to build backstories that would allow them to convincingly play Brazilians all over the world. Yeah, it's this kind of...

super illegal. I mean, I think you compare them to ghosts, right? Like the backstories are so unbelievably developed and thought out that they become most indetectable. That's the idea, right? Yeah. And that's what made it so hard for the Brazilian investigators to find them, first of all, and then prove they were spies. But it began with, you know, Sergei Chekhozov. He became the linchpin of the investigation. And

They figured out through his case this pattern to look for, these ghosts in the system. So what they looked for was someone who had an authentic Brazilian birth certificate that claimed they were born in Brazil. But then there was kind of no record of them actually being and living in Brazil for decades until they suddenly appear out of the blue as adults and very rapidly collect information.

or the Brazilian ID documents that most Brazilians spend, you know, a lot of their lives gathering. So things like driving license, military registration, voter registration, passport. And they then basically, this small counterintelligence team at the Brazilian Federal Police,

They then went through millions of records of Brazilian ID records, social security numbers, driving licenses, birth certificates, of course, all looking for that pattern, these ghosts in the system. And that's how they identified many of the spies. But they also had a lot of help from international intelligence agencies who helped them basically match these Brazilian aliases to these Russian spies' real identities.

And so why Brazil is kind of the obvious question. Why had Brazil been chosen as this factory for illegals? That was one of the big questions we had when we started out investigating this, right? Why Brazil? And there are a few reasons behind that, our sources told us. One of them is that, look, Brazil has a very diverse multicultural population. It's very easy for a spy or anyone else to blend in as Brazilian.

The other reason is that the Brazilian passport is a really useful passport to have. It gets you visa-free access to a lot of countries, almost as many as the American passport. So that was a really powerful tool for the spies to have. And the other reason, which is a bit more complex, is something that's part of the Brazilians' ongoing investigation right now, is potential weaknesses in immigration.

the Brazilians birth certificate system that looked like they were exploited by Russia. So whereas in a lot of countries you need a witness who is a doctor or a hospital to sign off on a birth certificate to say yes this child was born on this date. In Brazil there's this kind of niche exception where if you're born in a rural area or at least it's designed for people who are born in a rural area of Brazil where there's no hospitals no doctors for births it

It allows anybody to present two witnesses and say, you know, this child was born on this day. And that makes it much easier to fabricate false births, basically, false identities. But, you know, the Brazilians are also looking at whether there was corruption involved, whether the Russians had paid corrupt officials or somebody else to basically plant these birth certificates. But at the moment, their hypothesis, which was a pretty extraordinary part of our investigation, was...

when we learned this, but they got the forensic analysis back on the birth certificates in April. And they were really surprised by the results because they expected to find evidence of doctoring, tampering with the records. Actually, the forensic analysis came back and it didn't show any evidence of any tampering with the books, the ink, the paperwork. It's all normal. So now they're investigating whether, you know, Russia planted these drugs

in the 80s and 90s in the wake of the Cold War? And if so, how? And so do we have much of a sense of what their ultimate plans were for these spies? I mean, the plan, as far as we know, was for them to stay in Brazil for a period of time. And some of them were there for six plus years. And we don't think that they were doing much espionage, though it's possible they were doing some. And one of our characters had stationed his office, the fictitious office that he was using.

to burnish his cover credentials about a block away from the American consulate. So it's possible they were doing some espionage in Brazil. But the ultimate goal was just to create these fake identities. And only then would they be sent elsewhere. And so we know that some had already sort of begun this journey. One married couple was sent to Portugal. Another guy has done tours of the Middle East. Another of these spies

was working as a researcher in Norway. So the goal was for them to conduct espionage elsewhere while posing as Brazilians. And in that way, you know, they would have no connection to Russia. You know, the guy in Norway, as far as anybody knew, had lived and worked in Brazil his whole life and was just sort of posted to Norway in this academic position.

It was a way of laundering their Russian-ness through Brazil in order to more fully hide the fact of their espionage activities. It was probably Cherkassov, right, that we think was the most successful of the spies, right, Michael? And he probably gives us the most...

the most interesting insight or the closest insight as to what their goals were because he actually, you know, before he was arrested, he had just traveled to the Netherlands to start to take up this job, this internship at the International Criminal Court, just as it was about to begin investigating Russia for potential war crimes in Ukraine. So I think he got the fairness in his training and was the most successful. You know, he also went to John Hopkins University in the US and things like that.

So I think he's probably the closest we get. Would you agree, Michael, to knowing like what at least some of the spies were up to?

Yeah, he would, in sort of the annals of Russian illegals, especially in modern times, he would probably be considered an astounding success. I mean, one of the big questions that we have and that, you know, even our sources in other intelligence services, Western intelligence services have, is what really is the point of all this? Because it requires, it's incredibly resource-intensive, labor-intensive, and money-intensive operation.

preparing these people to do this work. And we don't really have much of a sense of what the benefits are. Granted, we may, you know, one day learn that, you know, Emmanuel Macron is just a very well-prepared, you know, Russian deep cover agent. But, you know, I don't think so. I don't think, you know, the goal, of course, is to get these guys ensconced in a foreign and enemy government. So if you could get your illegal agents

a job at the U.S. Defense Department, that would be an astounding success. But so far, there's no evidence that any of them have ever been able to make it that far. There was another, there was a major spy scandal in the United States in 2010, in which these illegals were all outed after some cases, decades undercover. And ultimately, it was determined that the intelligence they were producing was intelligence that sort of

Jane and I would be picking up at like press conferences we would attend. You know, these people weren't sort of getting access to highly classified super secret information. They were just sort of living and working in the United States and sending their assessments about what life was like in the United States back to their bosses and passing it off as intelligence. And so...

There's a sense, I think, among intelligence circles that a lot of this yields very, very little if you look at the time and energy that the Russian government puts into it. Yeah, there's something that feels almost quaint about this type of human intelligence in the age of disinformation and kind of electoral meddling. I'm thinking particularly of one of the kind of main characters in your story is this figure. He's known to his friends as Daniel.

And the life he lives, it is this classic illegal life, right? He has this fully developed... I mean, tell me a little bit more about Daniel as a character and the life he was living in Brazil.

Yeah, so Daniel is one of the spies we got to know the most in Brazil. He was there for nearly eight years, certainly over six. And he seems to like, more so than the other spies we looked at, really seems to have embedded and created a life there. So we know that, you know, he arrived in Brazil in 2015, in his early 30s, mid 30s. He'd built this whole life, this bona fide, successful life.

3D printing business. He had a Brazilian girlfriend who he lived with in this nice apartment in an upscale part of Rio. They had a large, fluffy Maine Coon cat. He'd built friendships and he seemed to like his life there. And the friends we spoke to were, you know, they missed him. They didn't feel...

feel betrayed or if they did, they missed him more than the sense of betrayal they felt. And we don't know, you know, what he was doing there. We know that his 3D printing business was near the US consulate. We know he had contracts with the military in Brazil, a big TV station. So he was doing well. And he, when he suddenly disappeared in Brazil,

January, well he left in December 2022. He left behind a lot of upset friends, girlfriend and a lot of unanswered questions. But one of the most interesting things we found out through Daniel's case, or his real name, I'll let Michael pronounce his real name, but we got hold of these texts between Daniel or Artyom in this case and his Russian wife because alongside his Brazilian girlfriend he also had

a Russian wife who was another intelligence officer who was based in Greece. And we got hold of these texts between the two and they're probably like, we don't know how many people knew their real identities, not many. So it's provided this like rare glimpse into their personal lives and it's often frustrating and hard. And in the text they're basically complaining about the

their lot and how Daniel's complaining or Artyom's complaining about a lack of results, about being in his mid-thirties, not having kids, like, you know, not where he wanted to be. And his wife is basically saying, get a grip, uh,

we have to make the most of what we've been given. Yes. And she uses these words. Yes, this life is not as it was promised and it is bad and they trick people. But, you know, you have to make the best of it effectively. And she's saying, look, if you wanted an ordinary family life, well, you made a mistake in choosing this life. And he certainly did. You know, this is a lifetime assignment that

these spies make at the very beginning of their life. They make this decision to join up with this program in their early 20s. And it's a life sentence, essentially. You don't get out of it. The Russian government spends an enormous amount of money and time preparing you. And I don't imagine it is a thing that you can just leave behind easily. No. And indeed, this life may have gone on indefinitely, were it not for, I'm

I mean, you make the point, not for the outbreak of the Ukrainian war, really, that seems to be the thing that kind of turns the dial on this. Can you just elaborate on that a little bit for me, why that was such a turning point in this story? Well, the Ukrainian war really, and Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it really galvanized the West in a way that I think

even Vladimir Putin did not count on. In fact, I think he was counting on the West to become fractured over the issue of the war and was surprised by how unified the West became in its response. And

One of the things that we've discovered is that this led to a concerted effort or a more concerted effort by Western spy services to out the activities of Russian intelligence officers operating all over the world. And so this Brazilian campaign, the investigation that led to a total of nine Russian spies being outed and their careers being destroyed, was part of a broader effort to

We mentioned that, you know, it was the result of a tip by the CIA, but there were a number of other countries involved in assisting the Brazilian investigation. And this is in part because of the war in Ukraine and the way that it unified the West in its response to Russia's aggression throughout the world. And it's telling that Brazil took such an aggressive stance on the Russian spies because Brazil is not like the United States. It's not like Britain. It has a neutral to friendly attitude towards

to Russia. In fact, Brazil's president was just in Moscow for the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, which is Vladimir Putin's big holiday, and was present on Red Square for the annual parade. And so Brazil has a more ambiguous relationship with Russia than the West, the many Western countries.

And it's telling that it went so aggressive against these Russian spies. For many, this crossed a line. For many, the Ukraine war crossed a line. And they have used that to root out Russia's pernicious influence wherever it turns up.

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So what has happened to those nine spies now? We think they're in Russia. At least we've been told they're in Russia. You know, after spies kind of return home, our sources stop looking for them. And so we've lost sight of them. We do know with the help of our experts and researchers here at The Times, we do know that some of them

have opened up, you know, accounts on like sort of local versions of Amazon and food delivery apps. So we know that, you know, at least some of them are ordering takeout. In Moscow, in Russia. That's sort of the most visibility we have into their lives. Yeah.

in Russia, but with their faces out there, their real names out there and their cover identities blown, we can be pretty sure that they're going to have a hard time working and operating outside of Russia as intelligence officers from here on out. And the Brazilians did something quite clever there in that when they, as they were investigating these nine spies, other than Chukasov,

One by one, they realized they'd slipped through their fingers, basically, like Daniel or Artyom. He had, he never came back to Brazil from his flight to Malaysia. And the others, they realized, had like just left Brazil years ago or had also just left Brazil. So they were kind of faced with this dilemma of, you know,

and frustration of, okay, we're onto these spies, but almost all of them have escaped. Like we can't do anything if they're not in Brazil. So what they decided to do is turn to Interpol, which is the world's biggest international policing agency. And they issued these alerts for them called notices. And basically what it does is it kind of publishes this alert, which includes their photograph,

their names, not necessarily their real Russian names, but their AESs, their fingerprints, and it broadcasts it to all 196 member countries of Interpol. So it's, you know, behind public doors, uh,

It's private, but it's gone out to all these, the police forces, the governments of all these countries and what it meant. And I should say Uruguay joined them and issued alerts against some other spies as well before we'd initially started looking into. So what it meant, as one of the sources told us, is like we thought what's worth than being arrested as a spy? It's being exposed as a spy.

So it's blown their identity, their cover identities at least, and it means they are very unlikely to ever be able to work abroad again. So it was their way of exposing and putting a stop to aspiring that had kind of mostly slipped through their fingers otherwise. And is Brazil pretty well satisfied that it managed to weed out all of the illegals living? I mean, it's...

It's a big pool to be fishing in, right? There must be some nagging fears.

Well, I think the investigation is still ongoing. And that's and that I think is why it's one of the reasons why when you read our story, none of the investigators are named. It's one of the reasons they gave for wanting to remain anonymous is that this investigation is still open. And I don't think you can. It's impossible to prove a negative. Right. So I don't think you could ever be sure that you've got them all.

They continue to do forensics on the birth certificates and try to figure out, get to the bottom of how it was that these seemingly authentic documents found their way into the registries in Brazil. And I don't think it's out of the question that there could be more Russian spies operating in Brazil and certainly as well. Let's remember that Vladimir Putin is a former KGB officer and...

Espionage is how he approaches international affairs. It is a primary tool, if not the primary tool that the Kremlin uses in engaging with the rest of the world. And while I think this investigation in Brazil was a pretty big blow to the illegals program, you can bet that

that they are going to continue pursuing these activities and will reconstitute and find new ways of carrying out espionage the way they have been, you know, for nearly 100 years. Yeah, I suppose that brings me to my final question, which is that

I mean, surely this raises the possibility of other nations that are being used in a similar way where loopholes are being exploited with the same intention, right? I mean, if you were Russia, you'd probably be spreading your bets a little bit and not just investing all of this resource into Brazil. Yes. Yes. The short answer to that question is yes. Brazil is not the only place they do this. If we remember in August last year to Brazil,

Russian spies operating with Argentinian cover identities were swapped after having been arrested in Slovenia. And so we know that they've used Argentina for this type of activities. And there's an entire mechanism behind

within the Russian intelligence service designed to support these activities. And so they are always looking for ways, ways to find new identities, ways to sort of construct the infrastructure to support these spies because it is a priority for Vladimir Putin. You rarely see Putin express emotion in public. And you do so when he is confronted with some kind of large wild animal like a bear or a tiger and

And you also see that when he talks about his illegals program, which clearly holds a special place in his esteem. And so you can bet that because it remains a priority for Putin, it remains a priority for Russia's intelligence services. And they're going to continue to pursue this all over the world. Absolutely. Thank you so much for bringing this really fascinating story to us. It's been a delight to dive into it with both of you. Thanks for having us. It's been a pleasure.

Thank you once again to Michael Schwartz and Jane Bradley. You can read their investigation entitled The Spy Factory in the New York Times. And thank you to you for being a Spyscape Plus subscriber. Don't forget to check out our member exclusive series, The Great James Bond Car Robbery and The Razumov Files. And as always, you'll continue to get new episodes of True Spies early and ad-free. It's a pleasure to have you along for the ride. Incoming transmission.

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