A Russian spy infiltrated NATO command offices and had an affair with a member of staff while posing as a social climber who had set up a jewellery business in Naples, according to a new investigative report.
Maria Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera told Italian friends she had a German dad and a Peruvian mum, and was born in the city of Callao in Peru, as she became a familiar face on NATO social scene.
She had moved around Europe before in 2013 settling in Naples, where NATO’s Allied Joint Force Command is based, and setting up a jeweller’s shop called Serein.
The honeytrap spy was able to become friends with NATO staff after becoming secretary at the Naples branch of the international Lions Club, and one NATO employee has admitted to having had a romantic affair with her, according to Bellingcat.
But in reality she reportedly was a Russian spy, a GRU officer who was a deep-cover agent where the person is based in a foreign location for a long period of time and is able to build roots while at the same time disclosing information.
Russia is well known to use deep-cover agents, which was particularly common during the Cold War in the Soviet era.
Her real identity, though, appears to have been exposed by an investigative report from Bellingcat working alongside Der Spiegel, The Insider and La Repubblica.
Bellingcat has said it began to follow Rivera as her passport was in a range that was being used by GRU operatives - it appears as though the Russians had made this surprisingly easy as for nearly a decade they had used consecutively numbered passports for their spies.
Christo Grozev, the CEO of Bellingcat said that looking more closely at Rivera it was clear that she had travelled on several Russian passports within this range.
Also in this range was a GRU operative who was reportedly involved in the attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, in 2018.
It was then noted by the investigative reporters that Rivera had bought a ticket from Naples to Moscow on September 15, 2018, which was a day after Bellingcat and The Insider had exposed that a range of passports were being used by Russian passports.
It published an article saying that the two Salisbury agents, who were travelling under the names of Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov, had suspicious passports.
Seemingly due to the threat of being caught, Rivera was then quickly removed back to Russia and out of the NATO social scene.
And for anyone perhaps wondering what had happened to her from Naples she posted a Facebook status saying: “It’s the truth I must finally reveal … Hair is growing now after chemo, very short but it’s there. I miss everything, but I’m trying to breathe.”
