Maria Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera was a jewelry designer and businesswoman in Naples, and there she maintained a store of her brand, Serein, selling earrings and rings with floral motifs to Italy’s high society.
She had specialized in the jewelry business near Rome and had already lived in Paris — where she created her brand — before settling in Naples. In addition to leading a life of luxury and wealth washed down with sparkling wine, she was also a secretary for a local unit of the Lions Club, an international civil society organization dedicated to improving the lives of the communities where it operates.
But this wasn’t just any Lions unit — the branch had been created by officers from NATO, the western military alliance made up of countries in Europe, the United States and Canada. Rivera attended several of the organization’s social events, at which he became close to members of the military club. With some of them, he even had brief relationships.
It was a glamorous life, as shown by the images posted on her Instagram profile, until in September 2018 she disappeared. Two months later, Rivera reappeared with a post on her Facebook in which she said she was recovering from cancer. “Hair is growing out after the chemo. Short, short but there. Missing everything but trying to breathe.”
Around the same time she disappeared, heads of Russia’s military intelligence service, known by the acronym GRU, spoke on the phone after investigative journalism website Bellingcat revealed the identities of two Russian spies linked to the poisoning of another former spy, Sergei. scriptal.
Hours after the intelligence officers’ conversation, Rivera bought a one-way ticket from Naples to Moscow. According to a long investigation published last Thursday (25) by Bellingcat in partnership with the Russian website The Insider, the socialite was, in fact, a Russian spy living for years under a false identity.
She was in Italy on business, spying on NATO, and it seems, according to the investigation, that she was hastily recalled to Russia by her superiors, who were afraid she would also be discovered. She had been undercover for a decade.
Rivera was an “illegal”, as Russian agents are known to live abroad for decades under a false identity. These professionals have been used by Russian intelligence since the early years of the former Soviet Union.
Her real name is Olga Kolova, and she now lives in Moscow in a luxury apartment, according to the investigation. The confirmation of her identity came in an unusual way: Kolova’s Whatsapp photo was the same as her alter ego Rivera’s Facebook profile.
Spies like her used to be difficult for counterintelligence agencies to discover, but in a world of biometrics, facial recognition software and online investigation possibilities, it has become harder for Russia to keep its infiltrators under the radar.
Christo Grozev, Bellingcat’s principal investigator, said in an interview that he discovered the trail of a possible infiltrator when he was searching a database leaked by Belarusian border agents and provided to him by a group of hackers opposing the regime of dictator Aleksandr Lukachenko. .
Grozev looked up Russian passport numbers at intervals known to have been used by GRU agents and found several results. Most had Russian names, but one stood out: Maria Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera.
Usually spies disguise their ties to Russia or the Soviet Union, but this was not her case. Apparently, an earlier attempt by Rivera to pose as a Peruvian citizen failed: a 2006 document notes that her application for citizenship to Peru was denied and found to be fraudulent.
The investigation also found that, apparently, the jewelry that Kolova sold to Italian high society was actually purchased on AliExpress, one of the biggest e-commerce platforms in China.
