The life story of ‘Maria Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera’ reads like the script of an episode of the hit Netflix series’The Blacklist‘, proving that the decades-old Soviet espionage techniques are back in 2022.
‘Maria Adela’ is the fake identity of the Russian secret agent Olga Kolobova, who was sent by the Russian military intelligence service GRU to Europe, where she successfully infiltrated the highest social circles, formed friendships and other relationships with officers and employees of the NATO mission in the southern Italian city of Naples. That’s what research collectives have Bellingcatthe Russian news site The Insiderthe German magazine of the mirrorand the Italian newspaper La Republica revealed late last week after a ten-month investigation.
German-Peruvian love child
For almost ten years, ‘Maria Adela’ managed to travel the world unhindered and also to live in Italy for many years, while posing as a jewelery designer and businesswoman. Via detours in Malta, Paris and Rome, the Russian eventually moved to Naples, a city with an important NATO base that holds strategic information about Southern Europe and North Africa.
She shared the same made-up life story with all her contacts: that she was the love child of a German father and a Peruvian mother, who took her to Moscow in 1980 to attend the Olympic Games. Hastily called away due to an emergency, the mother decided to leave her there with a Soviet couple befriended. The mother would never return, and ‘Maria Adela’ grew up unhappy with the Soviet couple, the reason that she “would never want to live in Russia”, according to her acquaintances, but said she wanted to build a life in Western Europe.
Russian secret agents often use a South American family background as part of their false identity. Olga Kolobova was forced to invent such a background after an application for Peruvian nationality was met with great suspicion in Peru, and went completely wrong there. She then traveled around with a fake Russian passport, under the name ‘Maria Adela’, allegedly of German-Peruvian descent.
Colonel’s Daughter
In Naples she would experience her most successful years as a spy. She delved into the life of ‘high society’ and in 2015 even became secretary and one of the most active members of a Lions club. In this way she came into contact with many NATO personnel. In 2018, ‘Maria Adela’ flew to Moscow with a one-way ticket. When she left, she had not yet been unmasked. Did Russian military intelligence bring her home for fear that this was about to happen, or because her mission had already met with sufficient success?
Nor is it clear whether Olga Kolobova managed to gain physical access to the NATO mission during her stay in Naples, and what information she allegedly provided Moscow. But her access in social circles to senior NATO personnel — according to the survey, she associated with Americans, Italians, Germans and Belgians — must have been valuable to the GRU anyway.
The investigative journalists managed to link the false identity of ‘Maria Adela’ to that of the Russian Olga Kolobova, the daughter of a Russian colonel who served in Iraq and Syria, including through facial recognition based on photos. In addition, there was also a strong numerical similarity between her passport and that of several other Russian passports of GRU agents, including the agents who poisoned Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, UK.
The Russian embassy in Italy responded to the investigation with a sarcastic cartoon, which read: “If you see Russian spies popping up everywhere, you must be reading La Repubblica too often.”