The “illegals” live in a permanent lie. They lie about the past and the present while the future doesn’t depend solely on them. Lying is part of the job of spies disguised as unsuspecting citizens.
case number one
Irina Alexandrovna Smireva, aka Maria Tsalla, is a 35-year-old Russian who has dreamed up so many things: daughter of Greek migrants, Belgian, passages in Brazil and Mexico. With fake documents from the latter country, he lands in Greece in 2017 and begins to tell a tearful story, perhaps with some true details. His declared wish is to start a new life in his home country. He relies on a few lawyers, including one of Russian origin who specializes in looking after foreigners. They put a 70-year-old from the village of Aliveri in the middle, who belongs to a small evangelical community and believes in good faith that he met Maria’s mother years earlier. He believes that it was this woman who called him on the phone to confirm her daughter’s story in front of the registry office. The man accepts, his testimony is another element with which the lawyers unlock the practice: This is how the thirty-year-old gets citizenship in 2018, even if the papers are grossly botched.
Since Maria is stealing the identity of a little girl who died immediately after birth in 1991, a common and effective technique, she uses a fairly common surname. No one notices the fraud, staff checks were hasty. It is the turning point for Maria Irina: she expands her activities, she devotes herself to photography and opens a knitwear shop in Athens, hires a saleswoman, goes to school to learn the language, apparently has a good economic situation because she trying to shop a house. In the meantime, he leads a normal existence. Photo exhibition, everyday shop life, vacations in Paris and Venice, a partner with whom he wants to marry one day. Or rather, that’s what she says. Apparently he doesn’t mention that he still has a passion for an ex-boyfriend in Brazil. They live far away from each other but have kept in touch: he calls himself Daniel Campos, but he is Russian and an alleged spy, also leads a double life and is a pretty local girl. It will be partly her fault and an investigation in Slovenia into two fake Argentines – always 007 from Moscow – if Maria’s parallel world is upset.
At the end of December, Campos left for Asia and explained to her friend that it was a short recovery period. But he no longer shows up and the Brazilian fears the worst and raises the alarm: she asks for help on social media, posts a photo of her partner and reports his disappearance. The Slovenians’ investigations and the story of Campos cause Maria-Irina to panic, she has to leave the country at the beginning of January, leaving behind her boyfriend, the shop, the computer, the beautiful house and a cat. She’ll email the shop assistant at the end of January saying she has to go because of health problems, she’ll trust her with her things – do what you want with them – try to at least get the cat back. However, this is not possible for bureaucratic reasons. Now counterintelligence is investigating who the mole’s targets were. The knitting shop is certainly not a bridge for who-knows-which encounters, more interesting are the repeated trips to places that also house bases used by the Americans, and then there are the trips to the EU area.
Perhaps Maria-Irina built the profile of the perfect Greek, possessed a clean European passport, and then used Greece as a base for missions elsewhere. Police questioned one of the lawyers involved in the regularization, he says he remembers little. His Russian-born colleague, on the other hand, cannot give any answers: he died in 2021 at the age of just 36. You remember how he came from Rostov on a grant from the State Department, the first step in a career as a fairly well-known lawyer, with a good network, a wife and a daughter. The alleged biological mother also died in 2013. In her past there were drug stories and an arrest. According to local media, however, the father committed suicide. They are superimposed details of parallel existences, sometimes muddled details, prone to sudden changes. We must take novelty and surprises into account.
case number two
Viktor Muller Ferreira, aka Sergei Cherkasov, reappears in Brazil in 2010 – he keeps coming back, and not just in these two stories – when Maria-Irina is building a real life with fake documents and patient trading. They identify him in April 2022 as he sets out for Holland but is stopped before he can do any damage. Apparently he wanted to infiltrate the International Court of Justice in The Hague, which also investigates war crimes. The Dutch send him back and the Brazilians launch an investigation that turns out to be a little treasure. Agents confiscated a hard drive and thumb drives from him, material that was then shared with the FBI as it emerged he was attending a university course in Washington, a study period designed to gather information about Israel and the United States .
The digital “memories” carelessly kept by Viktor-Sergei reveal a lot: five pages on which the illegal has summarized the important passages of his “legend”, i.e. the past built up by his superiors in Moscow: relatives, friendships, hobbies, supporters, passions, studies. A series of lies to offer to everyone he met. No less bizarre is the move to have archived information about the hiding places of some of his communication devices, which was later recovered. You’ll also find emails and draft messages with his Moscow contacts whose exchanges are striking: The Russian spy reports the opinion of “well-connected” US academics and think tanks who are skeptical of a vigorous response from the White House in the event of one invasion of Ukraine. The (erroneous) forecast of an operation “3-6 weeks long” reappears, they believe that America is not too keen on helping Kiev militarily. We know that many were wrong, in Washington as in Moscow. The spy didn’t tell a lie to his superiors, but what he thought was his truth.