🧵Meet Maria Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera, widow, jeweller, and socialite. The love child of a German father and a Peruvian mother, born in Callao, Peru, and abandoned in Moscow by her mother during the 1980 Olympic Games.
As she would tell her friends as an adult, she was raised by a Soviet couple her mother had befriended shortly before abandoning her. The couple treated Maria Adela badly, leading to Maria Adela seeking a better life abroad.
Between 2009 and 2011 she lived and studied in Western Europe, befriending people such as Marcelle D’Argy Smith, former editor of the UK edition of Cosmopolitan magazine, whom she met over drinks in Malta in the summer of 2010.
Maria Adela lived in Malta with her then boyfriend, but at some point moved to Ostia, near Rome, to take classes in gemology. She later moved to Paris and registered her own jewellery trademark in France under the brand Serein. marques.expert
In July 2012, Maria Adela married a man who she told friends was an Italian, but tragedy struck when he died in Moscow on 13 July 2013 aged 30, the cause of death recorded in the death certificate as “double pneumonia and systemic Lupus”.
Maria Adela was not one to be kept down by life’s twists and turns, and soon moved to Naples in Italy, where she opened the Serein boutique jewellery store, building a reputation in Naples society as a trendy jewellery designer and socialite.
Maria Adela didn’t just limit herself to the Naples in crowd, but expanded her interests to become the secretary of a local charitable organisation - the Lions Club Napoli Monte Nuovo.
This was not just a regular branch of the Lions Club, an organisation that spans the globe and which generally looks to better the communities it operates in and advance civic society. It had been established by Naples-based NATO officers.
Maria Adela attended many social events, befriending a number of NATO officers, inviting them to her exclusive jewellery store and even starting relationships with a number of them.
Recollections from Ms. D’Argy Smith and social media postings on Maria Adela’s Facebook, as well as on that of her company, show that as of 2013 she regularly travelled to Bahrain, attending an annual luxury goods and jewellery expo, Jewellery Arabia.
In December 2014, her company’s FB account posted a photo in which she can be seen seemingly gifting Serein cufflinks to the country’s then prime minister, Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa.
Suddenly, in September 2018, her social life evaporated, and she left Italy with her beloved cat, Luisa. Her friends were mystified at her sudden disappearance, but two months after her departure she posted on Facebook a message suggesting she was recovering from cancer.
But there was something else very special about September 2018. Three minutes before midnight on 14 September 2018, the phone of Maj. General Averyanov, the commander of GRU’s clandestine operations unit 29155 began to ring.
Earlier that day, Bellingcat and 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 Yuia Skripal. bellingcat.com
The investigation had blown the lid on a glaring hole in the GRU’s tradecraft: for nearly a decade, the GRU had furnished their spies with consecutively numbered passports, allowing investigative journalists to uncover other spies by simply tracing such batches of numbers.
Following the publication, Averyanov had received several phone calls from his top boss – the GRU’s chief Igor Kostyukov. Averyanov himself had reached out to many of his subordinates who had been travelling on such passports.
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.
The next day, Maria Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera bought a one-way ticket from Naples, Italy, to Moscow, flying on a passport from one of the number ranges Bellingcat had outed the previous day.
The widowed jewellery designed socialite who had become part of Naples social scene, befriending and starting relationships with NATO officers serving at the nearby NATO base was in fact a deep cover GRU operative.
Bellingcat and partners have now identified her real identify as Russian citizen Olga Kolobova, born in 1982, now living in Moscow in a high end apartment
bellingcat.com
bellingcat.com
It took months to uncover the real identity of “Maria Adela”, and as is often the case in these investigations the final piece of evidence was almost absurd; Olga’s WhatsApp profile used the same photo as Maria Adela’s Facebook profile. #opsec
I forgot my favourite part of the story, where she appears to have got her "exclusive" jewellery range from Ali Express vendors.
Christo Grozev is currently tweeting about some of the other little details that didn't make it into the final report, and how we found her in the first place
The Russian Embassy in Italy responds to our investigation with a cartoon "If you see Russian 007s everywhere, maybe you read too much la Repubblica." I guess Olga isn't going to get the Maria Butina treatment. Bad luck, Olga, 10 years of your life wasted.
If you want to hear more details about this case and the background of the investigation @christogrozev will be joined by myself and other investigators to discuss the investigation and the latest developments
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