Earlier that day, Bellingcat and its Russian investigative partner, The Insider, had published an investigation into the cover identities of “Ruslan Boshirov” and “Alexander Petrov”, two undercover GRU spies implicated in the Novichok poisoning of Sergey and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, England. The investigation had blown the lid on a glaring hole in the GRU’s tradecraft: for nearly a decade, Russia’s military intelligence agency had furnished their spies with consecutively numbered passports, allowing investigative journalists who had acquired data commonly leaked onto Russia’s black market to uncover other spies by simply tracing such batches of numbers.
The midnight caller was the head of GRU’s Department 5, or the so-called Illegals program – a little-known department that planted military spies around the world under false identities. The two GRU officers talked for just over two minutes.A Note on Call Record Metadata
In 2019 in the course of investigating the Skripal poisoning, we obtained metadata from call records of Maj. General Andrey Averyanov. These records, spanning the period from mid 2017 to late 2019, shed light on an expansive network of spies run by Russia’s military intelligence. The call data contains location, time and calling party data but no content of the communications.
The next day, 15 September 2018, a woman with a long, Latin-sounding name bought a one-way ticket from Naples, Italy, to Moscow. For around a decade, this individual had travelled the world as a cosmopolitan, Peru-born socialite with her own jewellery line. Later that evening, she landed in Moscow and is not known to have left Russia since. She flew on a passport from one of the number ranges Bellingcat had outed the previous day – in fact, hers only differed by one digit from the passports on which Boshirov and Petrov’s GRU boss had flown to Britain just six months earlier.
The name on her passport was Maria Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera, and as Bellingcat and its investigative partners have discovered, she was a GRU illegal whom friends from NATO offices in Naples had for years believed was a successful jewellery designer with a colourful backstory and chaotic personal life.
by Christo Grozev, Bellingcat | Read more:
Image: Marcelle D’Argy Smith
[ed. Don't know about you, but this kind of 'investigative' journalism feels deeply creepy to me (with numerous, mysterious unnamed sources). Of course she was a spy (or appears to be). So, the question is... now what? Or maybe, so what? See also: The Last Hour of Prigozhin’s Plane (Wired):]
“Looking at the information that is either available or not available is not enough,” says Tanya Lokot, an associate professor in digital media and society at Dublin City University who researches internet and media freedom. Lokot says it’s essential to consider the context of any information published from official Russian sources or in Telegram channels. For instance, she says, it is important to scrutinize why certain information—such as a list of names—may have been released at a particular time.
Lokot says it is also important to understand the motives of whoever is in control of this kind of information and how and when they decide to release it, as that helps shape a bigger narrative. “How they are presenting this incident and the fallout from this incident is really important to understand because it helps us also understand how they’re trying to control the information space to make sure that it fits their broader strategic narrative,” she says."
