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How Russia’s Spy Factory Assembled Moles in Brazil
Operatives Spent Years Creating Identities, Then Infiltrated Other Countries
Matt Davis
May 25, 2025
Morning! Today’s lead story is such a treat for those of us who treat spy fiction as the comfort food of modern “literature,” whatever that means.
Rather than bore readers with Donald Trump’s latest impulse-driven acts of dictatorial madness (go for Europe, go for Harvard, out-tantrum my child), today’s paper editors choose to lead with the perfect Sunday story, which is by Michael Schwirtz and Jane Bradley.
Remember the FOX show, The Americans with Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell?
They pretended to be American but they were Russian spies. They lived next door to an FBI Agent. It ran for six seasons, from 2013 to 2018, and I watched it all the way through. An acquaintance wrote a couple of the episodes, the ones where Rhys’s character betrayed a naive FBI secretary with whom he’d been having an affair. They were emotional carwashes. You came out feeling horrified but also, scrubbed clean.
Well, this story is basically The Brazilians!
“The Russians essentially turned Brazil into an assembly line for deep-cover operatives," Schwirtz and Bradley report — focusing on Russia's use of Brazil as a base to create deep-cover spies, blending into Brazilian society to later target the U.S. and Europe.
Holy crap! The headline uses the word “moles”, which is complex in its origins, actually.
The term was introduced to the public by British spy novelist John le Carré in his 1974 novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy[3][4] and has since entered general usage, but its origin is unclear,[1] as well as to what extent it was used by intelligence services before it became popularized. Le Carré, a former British intelligence officer, said that the term "mole" was actually used by the Soviet intelligence agency, the KGB,[2] and that a corresponding term used by Western intelligence services was sleeper agent.[5] While the term mole had been applied to spies in the book Historie of the Reign of King Henry VII written in 1626 by Sir Francis Bacon,[1][2] Le Carré said he did not get the term from that source.
That paragraph includes some of my favorite words and references. I love that Sir Francis Bacon was himself a spy for Queen Elizabeth I. Spies! Spies! Spies!
“That's a Smith & Wesson, and you've had your six.”
Ultimately my fascination with spies comes down to the unforgettable top-lip acting of Sean Connery as James Bond in 1962’s Dr. No.
After meeting Connery, Bond producer Barbara Broccoli went to the window and looked down and watched Connory “move like a panther across the street,” an acquaintance recalls. That was when they “knew they had their guy.”
He’s just so MEAN. That’s the point. And he’s doing it for England! I think! Or possibly Scotland! Or possibly not? The point is: SPIES.
Brazil, historically friendly with Russia, shifted its stance after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, aligning with global counterintelligence efforts. Brazilian counterintelligence dismantled the network in 2022, exposing nine spies, marking a significant blow to Russia’s intelligence operations. Although one wonders: If they were doing it in Brazil, were they perhaps doing it elsewhere, too?
Ultimately the story makes clear that 1. spy work of this kind is unglamorous and frustrating for those who do it and the 2. they’re disillusioned by spying for Vladmir Putin who is evidently a corrupt psychopath.
"No one wants to feel loser. That is why I continue working and hoping,” wrote one such spy to his wife.
And yet one “feels loser” often, mate, even when one isn’t a deep cover spy. But that doesn’t excuse this kind of thing. Or maybe it does, entirely. I don’t know! The piece is nicely illustrated with work by Lucy Jones. I know that:
It’s a web of spies!
These operatives built new identities by blending “seamlessly” into Brazilian society, starting businesses, forming relationships, and securing legitimate documents like birth certificates and passports. Brazil's strategic value for Russia lies in its lenient immigration laws, a widely accepted passport, and a multicultural environment that allows spies to adapt without drawing suspicion. Here’s how it started:
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.
Cha-ching! I love the “multiple identities” trope in spy movies. A go-bag full of passports, cash, and a couple of guns. Weirdly another acquaintance of mine is best friends with the director of this movie. Would you believe they’re both from the same playground?
“I mean, we're all trying to find out who the hell we are, aren't we?” — a quote from Robert Ludlum’s novel, The Bourne Identity, on which the movie was based. The dialog in the films misses a trick, I think. It could have been rewritten to have been more memorable. But the visual, kinetic pace of the films is fantastic and compelling.
Back to Brazil.
One such operative, Artem Shmyrev, operated under the alias “Gerhard Daniel Campos Wittich,” and lived in Rio de Janeiro for six years, running a 3-D printing business. He told his credulous mates that his unusual accent was “the result of a childhood spent in Austria.”
Ha ha ha.
Intelligence revealed that he and other operatives were not there to target Brazil but to use it as a launchpad for global spy efforts. Other such spies included a Russian officer posing as a jewelry business owner, another admitted to an American university, and others infiltrating European nations.
The underground network began unraveling in 2022 when Brazilian counterintelligence, aided by the CIA, identified Sergey Cherkasov, a deep-cover agent who had obtained real Brazilian identity documents under the name Victor Muller Ferreira. Cherkasov had even earned a graduate degree from Johns Hopkins University using his fabricated identity.
Cherkasov’s arrest triggered a deeper investigation, dubbed "Operation East," revealing “ghosts” in Brazil's identity system — real documents granted to non-existent individuals. Brazilian counterintelligence painstakingly analyzed millions of documents, eventually exposing at least nine Russian spies. Some were arrested, while others fled to Russia, their careers irreparably damaged.
“Operation East” marked a critical blow to Russia’s "illegals" program, a legacy of Soviet-era espionage.
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.”
It’s too bad that spying for Putin means propping up a corrupt dictator, I suppose.
The texts between Mr. Shmyrev and his wife are fascinating, revealing how bored and frustrated he was 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.”
Honestly his wife trying to jee him up while he is complaining is wonderful…
“If you want to think your life is shit - it is your choice.”
I feel like many husbands have heard that from their wives over the years.
And: “You said, thanks.”
I think we’ve all some sent some variety of that text in response!
“Mostly, it seems, the texts portray two spies who needed to vent their frustrations. How much contact they had with people who knew their true identities is unclear. Contact with each other at least gave them a chance, on occasion, to be themselves.”
And yet, who are you? Really?
The truth is, this whole story would be far better in fiction that it probably was in reality. Right down to the setting, which one can imagine better in Black and White:
Botofago, a neighborhood in Rio where Mr. Shmyrev had a drink with a friend the night before he disappeared.
Even the conclusion seems written for adaptation to the screen, describing a fantasy one of Mr. Shmyrev’s friends in Rio has about meeting up with him again.
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.
I’m again struck that espionage works far better as fiction than as fact. The reason we love spy stories is because they’re about the construction of an identity, which is what we all do in the world, whether we admit it to ourselves or not. If you’re autistic, for example, you might spend years “masking,” practicing authentic-seeming conversation in the mirror so that you can fit in more easily, socially. I think I based a great deal of my masculinity on watching Sean Connery films on repeat, growing up.
But to a greater or lesser extent we all mask who we are, our deeper impulses and our more superficial ones. The greatest challenge in life is to be as authentic as possible, but the joy of spy fiction, for me, is that it undermines our conception of what authenticity is in the first place. That’s why it’s so interesting. The states for which spies work are inevitably not able to live up to the loyalty spies pay to them in homage. I feel terrible for Mr. Shmyrev, for example. It seems like his life has really been rather a tragic waste of effort and energy, and I hope that he has found some peace and sense of purpose back in Russia, whatever identity he may be living under, now. Although let’s be honest, he could well be dead. In fact, yes. He’s probably dead, if Putin had anything to do with it.
Thanks for letting me read the newspaper so that you don’t have to!
Say, is there a story that might cheer me up a bit?
Sure. This is rather charming:
What else am I reading so you don’t have to?
I’m glad you asked. I’m on what’s probably my 15th reading of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy on audiobook, and I’m still reading Careless People about the lost idealism at Meta (it’s devastating…Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are just…sad) but I also have two good books on reserve at the library; The Doorman, by Chris Pavone, a literary thriller about an Upper West Side apartment building, and Rejection, by Tony Tulathilamutte, which I gather is a series of vignettes about people’s inability to handle the most important of formative modern experiences. Thanks to my mate Lee and the New York Times Book Review for recommending those. I also do want to read Keith McNally’s I Regret Everything and Graydon Carter’s When The Going Was Good, about working as an editor in New York in the last golden age of magazines. And I just requested The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum, too, because the book was probably better than the movies, I’m guessing, for the movies to have gotten made. As my wife tells me, I really don’t read enough books by women. I’m aware. So if you can recommend a good one I will read it out of a due sense of virtue-signaling obligation, I promise.
Matt Davis lives in Manhattan with his wife and kid.
Standard disclaimer: I read the top story in the New York Times every morning so that you don’t have to. If you were forwarded this, you can subscribe here. I’m also doing a five-minute video version of this, each weekday morning at around 9 a.m. (depending on how long it takes me to read the newspaper). If you’d like to follow me on LinkedIn (you can always watch the recording later). If you subscribe to my Youtube channel it’ll also send you a notification when I’m “going live.”