The story is from a movie.
Or a TV series.
Vladimir Putin's government deployed “moles” throughout South America.
Russians hidden behind Argentine, Brazilian, Peruvian, Ecuadorian, Uruguayan passports and who knows what other nationality.
“Sleeper cell” agents who can hibernate for years, even decades, waiting for an opportunity to serve the Kremlin.
From Russia, with love.
"Moles" are not traditional spies, if such a thing exists.
They are not Russians who admit to being Russian, with a Russian name, who can work as diplomats in a Russian embassy and who are expelled if they are caught offside
,
as happened with Aleksandr Belousov and Aleksandr Paristov, in Colombia, in December 2020. The “ moles” hide their true identity and even place of birth, and weave another life, wrapped in a web of lies.
No. The mission of the "mole" is very different.
It consists of building an unsuspected, even boring journey, which may include forming a couple and having children, studying, working and residing in one or more countries before reaching a destination that may be of interest to Moscow.
So yes, the "mole" will stop hibernating and will go into its active phase.
The latest saga of Russian "moles" began to unravel months ago.
Hard to pinpoint when.
But we can at least know the moment when a stitch jumped that allowed the thread to be pulled.
It happened on December 5, when elite troops from the Slovenian Police broke into offices and a family home in Ljubljana, the capital of the country.
They arrested a couple who moved with an Argentine passport, accused of working for Moscow.
He said his name was Ludwig Gisch and that he was born in Namibia, although he later settled in Argentina and obtained citizenship;
She said her name was María Rosa Mayer Muños and she was originally from Greece, although she also clarified that she was Argentine by choice.
They had two children – one aged 7, the other 9 – and shortly before the pandemic they decided to emigrate to Europe.
They affirmed that they were fed up with the insecurity of the streets of Buenos Aires and settled in Slovenia.
He set up a small computer company;
she, an art gallery.
And they began to travel, together or separately, through Europe and Argentina.
A front, the Slovenes suspect, to carry messages and money to other hibernating moles.
Gisch and Mayer Muños have been detained and held incommunicado ever since.
Slovenia wants to try them for espionage and falsification of documents, and they could be sentenced to eight years in prison.
But the versions run that this could come to nothing.
Russia reportedly started negotiations for a spy exchange, according to
The Guardian
newspaper .
Perhaps because of Evan Gershkovich, the
Wall Street Journal
journalist whom Moscow detained after the arrests in Ljubljana and, coincidentally, charged with espionage?
Russia is silent in public, but the dominoes began to fall.
The first was registered in Greece, where a woman disappeared shortly after the arrests of Gisch and Mayer Muños in Slovenia.
She claimed to be Maria Tsallas and to be a photographer, but it turned out that she appropriated her name from a deceased creature in 2001... and her real name would be Irina Alexandrovna Smireva.
The Greeks believe that she fled to Moscow.
The next domino piece fell almost immediately.
Tsallas's husband, the alleged Greek, claimed to be Brazilian and his name was Gerhard Daniel Campos Wittich.
He vanished into thin air in January while backpacking Malaysia, to the anguish of his Brazilian girlfriend, who didn't know his real identity or, for more information, that he had a wife in Athens... Authorities suspect he is also in Moscow.
The tiles began to fit together, like a puzzle.
In October, the Norwegian government arrested another alleged Brazilian who was working as an academic at the University of Tromsø, José Assis Giammaria, although his real identity would be Mikhail Mikushin and he would have the rank of colonel.
And the authorities of the Netherlands arrested in The Hague another alleged Brazilian, Viktor Muller Ferreira, who was trying to infiltrate the International Criminal Court (ICC) as an intern.
That is, the court that investigates war crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine.
His real name of him?
It would be Sergej Vladimirovich Cherkasov.
Muller Ferreira -or Cherkasov- would be the "mole" of this raid that came closest to reaching a sensitive site of extreme interest to Moscow.
Not bad for someone who would have been born in Kaliningrad and passed through Sao Paulo and Baltimore, before reaching a worthwhile destination.
But she was one step away, like a woman who years ago called herself María Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera, having been born in Peru to a German father and being a jewelry designer.
Based in Naples, she tried in practice to extract information from those who work at the military base that NATO operates there.
Her real name would be Olga Kolobova.
María Adela –or Kolobova- turned out to be quite a globetrotter, until love struck her.
Or perhaps the Kremlin passed her from the single team to the married team.
In July 2012 she married someone whom she introduced to her friends as Italian, even though her boyfriend had Ecuadorian and Russian citizenship.
In fact, he had obtained a Russian passport at the Russian Embassy in Quito three months earlier.
In any case, the man died a year after the marriage.
But she didn't bother to go to his funeral.
Either they got along very badly or the marriage was made of cardboard.
In any case, she is also now in Moscow.
But if the adventures of each of these "moles" leads to a season of
The Americans
, the Uruguayan Juan Lázaro wins all the prizes.
After settling in Peru, he became a national and married local journalist Vicky Peláez, before moving together to the United States, where they ended up behind bars.
In 2010 he confessed that he was not Uruguayan, nor was that his name.
He also recounted that his wife used to travel to South America to deliver intelligence information to her superiors and collect money to finance her covert operations.
He also left a phrase to remember.
"As much as I love my son, I would not break my loyalty to the [Secret] Service even for him."
That is loyalty.
Moscow before blood.
On July 9 of that same year, the man who had ceased to be Lazarus and admitted that his name was Mikhail Vasenkov returned to the underground life of the “moles”.
He was at a Vienna airport, where two planes landed.
Both full of spies.
The exchange was the most portentous since the end of the Cold War.
It is believed that Lazaro -or Vasenkov- is still in Moscow.
Almost thirteen years after that Viennese exchange of spies, the alarms continue to go off throughout the region.
Brazil is investigating whether Russia systematically uses its territory to build cover identities.
In Uruguay, the head of President Luis Lacalle Pou's security team was arrested in September 2022, accused of being part of a gang that issued apocryphal Russian birth certificates stating that the parents were Uruguayan.
So that?
Facilitate the obtaining of Uruguayan passports and identity documents for Russian citizens and, perhaps, generate new moles.
And in Argentina, it is striking that more than 10,500 Russians traveled to Buenos Aires to give birth during the last year.
Explanation?
Every person born in Argentina is, by law, an Argentine citizen and that, in turn,
facilitates the subsequent procedures of the parent to access citizenship.
More moles, too?
From Russia, with love.
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