MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
I love a good spy story, and this one, it is really good. It involves the Kremlin and Brazil, an operation that involved Russia sending novices to Brazil where they spent years building their cover identities, becoming Brazilian before deploying elsewhere in the world to spy. Jane Bradley is one of The New York Times reporters who broke this story. She's on the line from London. Hi, Jane.
JANE BRADLEY: Hi. Thanks for having me.
KELLY: Glad to have you with us. How many Russian operatives are we talking, and why Brazil?
BRADLEY: Very good question. So we're talking about nine Russian spies who were operating under Brazilian cover identities. And the question of why Brazil is kind of one of the first questions we had as well, and there's a couple of answers to that. The first is Brazil itself is a very multicultural, diverse population. It's easy for anyone to blend in. And the second thing is that Brazilian passports are, you know, one of the most useful and powerful passports in the world. It gets you into a lot of countries without a visa, so it's a very powerful, useful passport to have. And then the other point is more interesting and more complex, which is the Brazilian ID system. How you obtain birth certificates basically has an exemption - a loophole, if you like - that makes it easier to apply for a birth certificate than most other countries elsewhere. So that made it a really attractive target.
KELLY: It's so much time. It's such an investment. Do we know - were you able to document whether it ever bore fruit? Was Russia able to use any of these operatives to gather useful intelligence?
BRADLEY: It's such a tantalizing question, isn't it? And it's one we have tried to answer. And I think in a lot of the cases, we don't know. And that's partly because some of these Russian spies were clearly interrupted at the beginning or halfway through their training. They hadn't yet built those cover identities when Russia started recalling them for, you know, some reason or other. But we do have a clue in one spy, and this was a guy called Sergey Cherkasov. So he was probably the most successful of the spies.
What happened is he had spent about seven, eight years in Brazil building up his lore, building up his cover identity. And most interestingly, he had just got an internship at the International Criminal Court just as it was about to start investigating Russia for war crimes in Ukraine. But actually, when he turned up in the Netherlands, he was swiftly turned back from the border and sent back to Sao Paulo. And now the Brazilians, they got this call out of the blue, this tipoff from the CIA telling them that there was a Russian spy, a suspected Russian spy, on a plane back to Sao Paulo, and they needed to get ready.
KELLY: So let me jump in 'cause you bring us to the next thread of this tantalizing yarn, which is the CIA has a tip. They share it with Brazilian officials. I know there were many twists and turns, but what did Brazil do with it? How did they unravel this?
BRADLEY: They went through his birth certificate and tracked down relatives connected to the mother listed on his birth certificate. And what they found is that his mother had died and never had any children. That's from a relative they spoke to. And his father, they found no record he existed. So that then gave them a way to prove that he wasn't who he said he was, and that led to Cherkasov becoming the linchpin of the whole Brazilian investigation.
And they used that same tactic to then identify the others. And what specifically they were looking for was basically these ghosts in the system, people who pose as Brazilians who had authentic birth certificates, said they were born in Brazil, but they were basically - there was no record of them existing in Brazil until they suddenly appeared, you know, decades later as adults and started rapidly collecting these ID documents...
KELLY: Right.
BRADLEY: ...That most Brazilians spend their whole lives collecting.
KELLY: Jane Bradley, where are these spies now?
BRADLEY: The $1,000,000 question. We've been trying to find out. And we know that, obviously, Cherkasov, the first spy, he is still in prison in Brasilia thanks to the Brazilian cops' efforts. But with the other spies, they'd actually all, like, just slipped through the Brazilian cops' fingers as they identified them. And the intelligence officials we have spoken to from various countries believe that they're all now back in Russia.
KELLY: When you took this story to Russian authorities for comment, as I'm sure you did, they admitted everything and were incredibly helpful in confirming it all on the record for you, right?
(LAUGHTER)
BRADLEY: Of course, of course they did. They did not, they did not (laughter).
KELLY: Did you get any comment at all?
BRADLEY: No, we've had a wall of silence from them. But that's not unusual, to be honest. But we're speaking to other intelligence sources and trying to get an answer to that very question - right? - where are they now? What's happened to them? And we know their friends, their lovers back in Brazil - certainly in the case of one of the spies, known as Artem Shmyrev - they have big questions about where their friend went. And actually, we thought they might feel a bit betrayed. But mostly, you know, they were either so good at building their cover identities or they genuinely loved their life in sunny Rio because they kind of didn't care too much that they'd been lied to. They just wanted to know that their friend, Daniel, as they knew him - Artem's cover identity - was OK.
KELLY: Oh.
BRADLEY: Very forgiving of them. I don't know if I'd be that forgiving (laughter).
KELLY: Oh. Jane Bradley, investigative reporter at The New York Times, talking about the story she and Michael Schwirtz published today headlined "The Spy Factory." Thank you.
BRADLEY: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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