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Johns Hopkins graduate Victor Ferreira was unmasked as GRU operative Sergey Cherkasov, in keeping with a federal indictment and Western safety officers
March 29, 2023 at 2:00 a.m. EDT
The achievement was even sweeter for Ferreira as a result of he was not the striving pupil from Brazil he had portrayed on his Johns Hopkins software, however a Russian intelligence operative initially from Kaliningrad, in keeping with a collection of worldwide investigations in addition to an indictment the Justice Division filed in federal court docket Friday.
His actual identify is Sergey Cherkasov and he had spent practically a decade constructing the fictional Ferreira persona, in keeping with officers and court docket data. His “workforce” was a decent circle of Russian handlers instantly poised to have a deep-cover spy within the U.S. capital, positioned to forge connections in each nook of the American safety institution, from the State Division to the CIA.
Utilizing the entry he gained throughout his two years in Washington, Cherkasov filed stories to his bosses in Russia’s army intelligence service, the GRU, on how senior officials in the Biden administration were responding to the Russian military buildup before the war in Ukraine, in keeping with an FBI affidavit.
After he graduated, he got here near attaining a extra consequential penetration when he was supplied a place on the Worldwide Legal Court docket in The Hague. He was as a consequence of begin a six-month internship there final yr — simply because the court docket started investigating Russian war crimes in Ukraine — solely to be turned away by Dutch authorities performing on data relayed by the FBI, in keeping with Western safety officers. Officers within the Netherlands put him on a aircraft again to Brazil, the place he was arrested upon touchdown and is now serving a 15-year jail sentence for doc fraud associated to his faux identification.
The small print which have since emerged present extraordinary visibility into extremely cloaked points of Russian intelligence, together with the Kremlin’s nearly obsessive effort to infiltrate Western targets with “illegals” — spies who function as lone brokers with no discernible hyperlink to their dwelling service — reasonably than diplomats with the authorized protections that include understanding of an embassy.
The case has revealed lingering vulnerabilities in Western defenses greater than a decade after the FBI arrested 10 Russian illegals in a sweep that made international headlines and spawned a preferred tv collection, “The Individuals.” U.S. officers acknowledge that the bureau found Cherkasov’s identification and GRU affiliation solely after his arrival in Washington. The FBI declined to touch upon the case.
The revelations have additionally uncovered severe lapses in Russian tradecraft. Authorities have mined Cherkasov’s pc and different gadgets and located a trove of proof, in keeping with court docket data and safety officers, together with emails to his Russian handlers, particulars about “lifeless drops” the place messages might be left, data of illicit cash transfers, and an error-strewn private historical past that he seems to have composed whereas attempting to memorize particulars of his fictitious life.
His arrest final April got here on the outset of an ongoing roll-up of Russian intelligence networks throughout Europe, a crackdown launched after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that officers say has inflicted better injury on Kremlin spy businesses than some other effort because the finish of the Chilly Conflict.
The FBI and CIA have performed in depth behind-the-scenes roles on this wave of arrests and expulsions, in keeping with Western officers. The costs filed Friday adopted a multiyear investigation during which FBI brokers gained entry to gadgets seized by authorities in Brazil, in keeping with the indictment, and have been permitted to satisfy with the accused spy face-to-face in São Paulo.
This text relies on interviews with senior U.S., European and Brazilian safety officers together with Brazilian court docket paperwork obtained by The Washington Publish that haven’t been beforehand launched, in addition to the U.S. indictment.
Russia has denied that Cherkasov is a spy and requested his extradition from Brazil by presenting what U.S. officers regard as one more fictional identification, claiming that he’s neither pupil nor undercover agent however a needed heroin tracker who fled Russia to keep away from jail.
Cherkasov’s accounts of his life have additionally shifted dramatically. After initially insisting that he was Ferreira and that Dutch authorities have been mistaken, he admitted his Russian identification in hopes that doing so would assist him safe a diminished sentence, stated Paulo Ferreira, an lawyer who represented Cherkasov and has the identical final identify as his shopper’s alter ego.
Even then, Cherkasov engaged in additional deception, in keeping with Brazilian court docket data. At one level, he delivered a tearful confession during which he stated he had fled Russia out of worry of punishment for a petty crime. He later endorsed the story offered by the Russian authorities, despite the fact that it supposedly meant dealing with a fair longer sentence in a Russian jail system infamous for its brutality.
Cherkasov’s lawyer declined a request from The Publish to talk together with his shopper, saying he “doesn’t wish to speak with any journalists.”
It isn’t clear whether or not the US can even search Cherkasov’s extradition, however U.S. officers stated one of many issues behind the indictment was that it’d assist preempt Russia’s try and safe the return of its spy. Cherkasov was charged with illegally operating as a foreign agent as well as multiple counts of bank, wire and visa fraud.
The Russian Embassy in Washington didn’t reply to requests for remark.
A convoluted ‘legend’
The creation of the Victor Ferreira character started in layers of fraudulent paperwork that functioned as a type of chrysalis.
A substitute delivery certificates bearing the Ferreira identify was purportedly issued in 2009, a yr earlier than Cherkasov entered Brazil, in keeping with Brazilian court docket information. A driver’s license adopted with a photograph of somebody aside from Cherkasov. The paper path means that Cherkasov’s path was cleared prematurely by Russian enablers and brokers already in place.
The GRU seems to have exploited vulnerabilities in Brazil’s immigration and record-keeping system, whereas additionally counting on inside assist. A notary who signed off on lots of Cherkasov’s fraudulent submissions obtained presents together with a Swarovski necklace, in keeping with Brazilian data and the U.S. indictment. The position of the notary is one focus of an ongoing Brazilian investigation into Cherkasov’s espionage actions within the nation and the actions of the GRU, officers stated.
Having gained a foothold, Cherkasov proceeded to gather further residency paperwork underneath the Ferreira identification, together with a taxpayer ID, a brand new driver’s license with a photograph that truly matched his look, in addition to a Brazilian passport.
Throughout these early years in Brazil, he held jobs together with one at a journey company that the FBI suspects was run by a GRU operative, in keeping with the affidavit. The journey company — one other echo of “The Individuals” tv present — has since closed down.
Cherkasov’s “legend” — the espionage time period for a fabricated backstory — was convoluted and tragic. It depicted an nearly Dickensian upbringing involving a collection of surrogate caretakers and prolonged departures from the nation after the dying of his mom. To bolster this biography, the GRU forged Cherkasov because the son of Juraci Eliza Ferreira, a Brazilian lady who died in 1993.
In actuality, she died childless, in keeping with court docket data in addition to her nephew, Juliano Arenhart. “So far as we all know, she by no means had a toddler,” Arenhart stated in an interview with The Publish.
One of many more strange items of proof to emerge within the case is a rambling four-page doc discovered on Cherkasov’s pc that’s written in Portuguese and reads just like the notes of an actor attempting to familiarize himself with a component.
“I’m Victor Muller Ferreira,” it begins, earlier than unspooling a contrived hard-luck story sprinkled with random particulars. He describes his aversion to the scent of fish close to a bridge in Rio de Janeiro, and a pinup poster of Pamela Anderson in a mechanic’s store the place he supposedly labored.
Different passages appear to anticipate suspicion about his blond hair and puzzling accent, rehearsing methods to deflect such consideration by claiming German ancestry and lengthy stretches in another country throughout which his Portuguese expertise declined.
“My fellow pupils usually used to joke about my seems to be and my accent,” it says about his days at faculties he by no means actually attended. “They referred to as me ‘gringo.’ That’s the reason I didn’t have many mates.”
By itself, the clunky script displays an absence {of professional} polish. The truth that he was nonetheless carrying it with him on a laptop computer a decade later, in keeping with the FBI affidavit, is a startling breach of operational safety.
In some methods, shoddy self-discipline has turn into a signature of Cherkasov’s alleged employer. In recent times, GRU operatives have appeared to make little effort to cowl their tracks in brazen operations together with the hacking of Democratic Nationwide Committee computer systems in 2015, the poisoning of Russian defector and former spy Sergei Skripal in England in 2018, and the tried assassination of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny practically three years in the past.
Regardless of the tradecraft lapses, Cherkasov made remarkably swift progress towards his purpose of infiltrating Western establishments.
After acquiring an undergraduate diploma at Trinity Faculty Dublin, he utilized to 2 graduate packages in Washington, in keeping with the FBI affidavit. The doc doesn’t identify the colleges, however professors and college students at Johns Hopkins confirmed his attendance.
James Steinberg, the dean of the Faculty of Superior Worldwide Research, declined to touch upon any facet of the case or its aftermath at Johns Hopkins.
The glee Cherkasov expressed about his admission was adopted with related elation weeks later when he obtained a pupil visa to enter the US.
“Man, I obtained it! I f—ing obtained it!” he wrote in an e-mail to his handlers, in keeping with the affidavit. “We go there being welcomed! We gained, bro. Now we’re within the big-boys league.”
Cherkasov, who was 33 when he began at Johns Hopkins however was posing as a pupil in his late 20s, aroused solely the vaguest of suspicions amongst his professors and classmates.
“I didn’t suspect any Russian in his conduct or accent,” stated Eugene Finkel, a professor and native Russian speaker who had Cherkasov in two lessons at Johns Hopkins, together with one on genocide. In a posting on Twitter after the case turned public, Finkel stated Cherkasov had been “very sensible and competent” and offered himself as Brazilian with Irish roots, so his “bizarre accent made sense.”
One classmate, nevertheless, described a clumsy encounter. A former U.S. Navy officer additionally fluent in Russian stated the 2 briefly bonded after class sooner or later over their shared appreciation for bikes.
“I stated we must always journey collectively,” stated the previous officer, who spoke on the situation of anonymity, citing concern for his security. As the 2 college students talked, the previous officer stated, he detected a hint of Russian in Ferreira’s diction and thought it odd {that a} Brazilian would have such a Russian-sounding first identify.
“I stated, ‘I grew up talking Russian — do you have got any Russian ancestry,’” the previous officer stated. Ferreira recoiled and replied, “No, I’ve German,” the previous officer stated. After initially expressing enthusiasm about using bikes collectively, Ferreira dropped the plan and stored his distance, stated the previous officer. “He actually stepped again from answering questions at that time.”
Throughout his last yr at Johns Hopkins, Ferreira took half in a area journey to Israel with classmates, a visit he used to gather data on U.S. and Israeli officers in addition to others the scholars met with, in keeping with the affidavit. He then shared the checklist with a Russian handler he met secretly throughout a January 2020 journey to the Philippines.
Different mysteries about Ferreira seem to have gotten little scrutiny from the college, together with how somebody from such a supposedly impoverished background — who was supplied no scholarships — might afford tuition and different fees that exceeded $119,000 over two years.
After his arrest in Brazil, Cherkasov claimed to authorities that he had lined his expensive schooling with shrewd bets on bitcoin. The FBI affidavit alleges that he was receiving common money infusions from his Russian handlers, cash he then routed by U.S. and Irish financial institution accounts.
As commencement approached in 2020, Cherkasov flooded the sphere with purposes for internships and different positions. Amongst these he focused, in keeping with the affidavit, have been the United Nations in addition to “U.S. suppose tanks, U.S. monetary establishments, a U.S. media outlet and a place within the U.S. authorities.”
With the coronavirus pandemic inflicting a downturn in hiring, it’s not clear what number of gives, if any, Cherkasov obtained. He left the US in September 2020, in keeping with the affidavit, simply months earlier than his pupil visa was set to run out.
Even from Brazil, Cherkasov continued to seek out methods to faucet into his Washington community. In late November 2021, as Russia was amassing forces on the border of Ukraine, Cherkasov filed a collection of stories to his handlers about how senior officers in Washington have been deciphering Moscow’s strikes.
The affidavit cites emails that Cherkasov despatched describing data gleaned from advisers at suppose tanks, some supposedly involved with senior Biden administration officers together with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. One other report relayed that Protection Secretary Lloyd Austin had been cautioned “to not give any conceivable sign of the U.S. army involvement” to his counterpart in Ukraine.
“That means: the administration is unquestionably not in any place to assist Ukrainians, if the struggle breaks out,” Cherkasov wrote, in keeping with the affidavit. “The administration doesn’t need this battle, as a result of they don’t have any significant manner of gaining one thing out of it.”
The data was attributed to considered one of Cherkasov’s former professors, who shouldn’t be recognized within the affidavit. The professor instructed the FBI that he couldn’t recall any post-graduation interactions with Cherkasov, however that he had held on-line discussions about the specter of Russian invasion. The bureau concluded that Cherkasov was in all probability “collaborating in a type of on-line periods.”
Cherkasov appeared satisfied that Russia would face little backlash from the US for a Ukraine invasion, saying in a single message that there have been “no indicators indicating that the U.S. goes to supply any however political help to the Ukrainians in case of battle.”
His sanguine stories tracked the deeply flawed assessments that Russian spy businesses rendered within the months earlier than the invasion, in addition to Putin’s personal expectations that the battle would finish rapidly with little interference from the West.
Cherkasov obtained his subsequent massive break quickly thereafter, an internship provide from the Worldwide Legal Court docket. Created twenty years in the past to implement worldwide legal guidelines in opposition to genocide, battle crimes and different atrocities, the court docket has lengthy been perceived by Moscow as hostile. Final month, prosecutors there issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing him of battle crimes in Ukraine.
As an unpaid intern, Cherkasov would have been in place to roam the court docket’s glass-enclosed corridors and attempt to probe its firewalled pc system, in keeping with Western safety officers, who stated Russia more and more makes use of human spies to put in software program or gadgets that allow technical penetrations.
By March 2022, only a few weeks after Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion, Cherkasov had “handed the safety checks of the ICC and was accepted to the place of junior analyst,” in keeping with the affidavit.
In Brazil, Cherkasov started tidying his affairs. He sought to “meet with a courier” to stockpile money to maintain him in his unpaid place. He stashed pc drives and different gadgets in dead-drop areas alongside a jungle mountaineering path close to São Paulo, sending directions to his Russian handlers on the place to seek out them. He additionally mentioned methods for future conferences together with his handlers, proposing return journeys to Brazil that may be simple to elucidate to the ICC.
On March 31, as he boarded a flight to Amsterdam, neither Cherkasov nor his GRU handlers appeared conscious of the web closing in on him. By then, the Dutch intelligence service had picked up its personal indicators that the Russian Embassy in The Hague was making preparations for the arrival of an vital new unlawful, in keeping with a Western safety official.
Authorities within the Netherlands then obtained a file from the FBI with a lot element about Cherkasov’s identification and GRU affiliation that they concluded the bureau and the CIA had been secretly monitoring Cherkasov for months if not years, in keeping with a Western official acquainted with the matter.
Dutch officers intercepted Cherkasov on the airport, questioned him for a number of hours, scoured his gadgets, and used facial recognition software program to match the picture on his passport to on-line pictures of Cherkasov throughout his pre-GRU days in Kaliningrad. The Dutch then pressured him to board a return flight to Brazil.
He was detained upon arrival in Brazil, the place he denied that he was a Russian operative, insisting that the entire matter was a mix-up and that his Ferreira identification was actual. Earlier than touchdown again in Brazil, nevertheless, he had despatched agitated messages to a lady in Russia he had been romantically concerned with for years, in keeping with the affidavit, searching for to enlist her to assist in contacting considered one of his GRU superiors.
Two months after Cherkasov’s expulsion, Dutch authorities issued a rare information launch about his failed try and enter the nation, posting the clumsy biography they stated he had composed in about 2010. Dutch officers stated the choice to go public was a part of an effort to reveal Russia’s conduct and name allied governments’ consideration to the specter of illegals.
The information rapidly rippled by the ranks of Cherkasov’s classmates and professors at Johns Hopkins.
Nobody was extra dismayed than Finkel, the professor, who had written a letter of advice to help Cherkasov’s software to the ICC. “I had good causes to hate Russian safety providers earlier than. Now I’m simply exploding,” Finkel, a local of Ukraine who had denounced the Russian invasion and referred to as for investigations of battle crimes, wrote in anguished posts on Twitter. “I’ll by no means recover from this truth. I hate all the things about GRU, him, this story. I’m so glad he was uncovered.”
In Brazil, Cherkasov was assured the 15-year sentence wouldn’t stick.
“No f—ing manner I’m staying right here,” he stated in a June 7 message to the Russian lady, whom he had sought permission from his GRU handlers to marry, in keeping with the affidavit. “They ‘had’ to present me a giant sentence to save lots of their faces okay? No one goes to take a seat right here serving f—ing 15 years for a faux passport!”
In a message despatched in late August, he assured the identical lady that his case can be completed in a matter of weeks and that by New Yr’s the 2 can be strolling across the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. “All will likely be nicely,” he stated, signing off as “Prisoner of Conflict.”
The affidavit signifies that Cherkasov used messaging apps to ship images of handwritten messages to the girl, presumably on gadgets he was ready to make use of whereas assembly with Russian diplomats throughout his detention.
Eight months later, Cherkasov stays in jail amid blended indicators about his eventual destiny. The Brazilian Supreme Court docket not too long ago granted tentative approval to Russia’s extradition request. Russian Overseas Minister Sergei Lavrov is scheduled to go to Brazil in late April, elevating the prospect that Moscow will discover a method to safe his launch.
Even so, Brazil’s excessive court docket has stated that no extradition can happen till the nation’s federal police conclude a second investigation that’s centered on Cherkasov’s alleged espionage actions.
The Cherkasov case has been a supply of embarrassment for Brazilian officers about their system’s susceptibility to fraud and the frequency with which it has been utilized by Russian intelligence providers as a launchpad for illegals. One other alleged GRU operative counting on a false Brazilian identification was arrested in Norway final yr.
Brazilian officers declined requests for on-the-record interviews however stated the federal government is instituting new procedures together with nationwide identification checks to assist curtail such fraud. Cherkasov’s long-term plan was to make use of his false Brazilian identification to use for Portuguese citizenship, which might have enabled him to roam freely throughout Europe, in keeping with officers and particulars within the affidavit.
The Cherkasov case has additionally raised troublesome questions for Johns Hopkins, together with whether or not it ought to do extra to display screen candidates, whether or not Cherkasov’s diploma ought to be rescinded, and what the college ought to do with tuition funds it presumably obtained not directly from the GRU.
Gabriela Sá Pessoa in São Paulo, Marina Dias in Brasília and Cate Brown in Washington contributed to this report.
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