Russia is known to have deep-cover spies in numerous countries—but the ones it sent to Brazil were different. According to a New York Times investigation, Moscow used the country as an "assembly line" for spies whose job it was "not to spy on Brazil, but to become Brazilian." The operatives obtained genuine Brazilian identity documents and established lives in Brazil, often with partners and successful businesses, before they were deployed to other countries. Brazilian counterintelligence agents combed through millions of identity records to uncover what they called Operation East—but many of the spies had fled the country by the time their covers were blown.
One spy who went through the "assembly line" was Artem Shmyrev—known to his friends as Gerhard Daniel Campos Wittich, a 34-year-old Brazilian who claimed his slight accent was the result of a childhood spent in Vienna, the Times reports. He ran a 3D printing business and lived in an upscale Rio de Janeiro apartment with his girlfriend. Friends say he joked about "industrial espionage" when he took sudden trips to Europe and Asia. His business was very successful—but in 2021 he complained to his wife, a deep-cover spy in Greece, that he wanted to begin real spy work after years building the identity and had "no real achievements" to speak of.
The entire operation began to collapse after the CIA in April 2022 informed Brazilian authorities that Victor Muller Ferreira, a Johns Hopkins University graduate with a Brazilian passport who had taken up an internship at the International Criminal Court, was really Russian spy Sergey Cherkasov. Investigators looked for other "ghosts" who had Brazilian birth certificates—obtained through a loophole—but no records of spending much of their lives in Brazil.
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Shmyrev left Brazil days before his real identity was exposed and soon stopped contacting his girlfriend and friends. His wife also disappeared from Greece. Friends say the romantic partners of both spies were devastated, the Guardian reports. A friend of Shmyrev's tells the Times that in his final call to his girlfriend, he said he never "did anything that bad"—but his past had caught up with him. (More Russian spies stories.)
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