Maria Adela Kuchfeldt Rivera was a jeweler and well-known socialite in Naples.
She had many friends, she participated in the activities of charitable organizations and used to attend gatherings of glittering jewelers in Dubai.
She told her friends that she was born in 1980 to a Peruvian mother who abandoned her in Moscow after she participated in the Olympics that took place in the city and brought many foreigners to the territory of the Soviet Union - a relatively logical story since many children of foreigners were born after the Olympics in the territory of the Soviet Union.
Her Facebook page also said that she married an Italian citizen, who mysteriously died of lupus, a rare and mysterious disease, during a visit to Moscow.
Kolbova and a senior British journalist she befriended in Ibiza,
But one day in 2018, Rivera disappeared without leaving a trace.
The apartment, where she used to host her large circle of acquaintances, which included journalists and commanders of the NATO force stationed near Naples, was left deserted and her cat Elisa also disappeared with her.
Two months after her disappearance, a strange post appeared on Rivera's Facebook page claiming that she was in Moscow for cancer treatment.
However, an investigation carried out by the international research website "Blingcat" revealed that she was a spy in the Russian military secret service, the GRU, and that her glittering career as a jeweler and socialite was merely a cover story aimed at spying on senior NATO officials in the country.
Kolbova and her "husband" who died mysteriously of lupus in Moscow,
What is amazing about the story is that the exposure of Rivera, whose real name is Olga Kolobova, was made possible by unprecedented laziness on the part of Russian military intelligence.
The organization issued its agents with very high-level counterfeit passports that are almost impossible to trace or detect, except for a small but critical flaw: the passports were issued with consecutive passport numbers.
Kolobova's exposure was made possible after two Russian spies were arrested in Britain following the assassination attempt on Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy who lived in Britain.
A simple search of the serial passport numbers could have led to Kolobova's exposure and capture, and she was flown out of Italy that day.
The spy's name was revealed in a way that shed light on another amateurism, Kolobova's photo on her personal WhatsApp account matched that of the fake jeweler, who managed to fool the high society of Paris, Rome and Naples.
Kolubova was able to hook up with, hook up with, and even have romantic encounters with many NATO officers and she did this through membership in an international charity organization that operated a large branch in the region.
Kolubova's story is not just a story of an insignificant Russian spy who managed to connect with the European glamor world with alarming ease, but Also of the amateurism and the huge gaps that exist in the Russian intelligence apparatus, failures that may explain the perceptual and intelligence failure that enabled the Russian invasion of Kiev and northern Ukraine in February and the reason it ended in a Russian withdrawal after heavy losses.
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