It has all the weather of an espionage thriller: An accused Russian spy who concocted an id as a Brazilian. The creation of an elaborate cowl story. And what Dutch authorities mentioned gave the impression to be a foiled plot to achieve entry to the International Criminal Court because it investigates Russian warfare crimes.
Those particulars emerged this week in a real-life case wherein Dutch officers mentioned 36-year-old Sergey Vladimirovich Cherkasov spent years constructing an id as a Brazilian citizen, sprucing a résumé that received him an internship on the International Criminal Court in The Hague earlier than Dutch officers blew his cowl.
According to Dutch intelligence, Mr. Cherkasov pretended to be a Brazilian named Viktor Muller Ferreira, and received an internship on the courtroom utilizing an in depth cowl story that hid his ties to the Russian army intelligence company, the G.R.U.
Mr. Cherkasov was attributable to begin working on the courtroom, however was denied entry to the Netherlands at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in April after the AIVD, the Dutch intelligence company, tipped off immigration officers. He was despatched again to Brazil and declared an “undesirable alien,” intelligence officers mentioned in a press release Thursday. Officials didn’t say how they recognized him as a spy.
The International Criminal Court is investigating potential warfare crimes by Russia in its invasion of Ukraine, in addition to the Russian-Georgian warfare in 2008.
“If this person had gotten the chance to really work at the I.C.C., he could have gathered information, could have spotted sources (or recruited them) and could have gained access to the digital systems,” the Dutch intelligence service mentioned in a press release. The G.R.U. has been blamed for cyberattacks on the U.S. and Ukraine.
The Dutch intelligence company printed a doc that it mentioned Mr. Cherkasov in all probability wrote in 2010, laying out a canopy story that included particular particulars in regards to the purported background of Mr. Ferreira, together with which highschool he attended and what number of college students have been on the faculty; well being details about his aunt; a crush he had on a trainer; and the way a lot hire he paid for an condo in Brasilia.
It will be onerous to know what’s true from such cowl tales, as a result of they’re typically a mix of true and false data, together with private observations which might be onerous to disprove, Dutch intelligence mentioned.
The doc blacks out the names of establishments and different particulars, although he appeared to have a connection to Johns Hopkins University.
Eugene Finkel, a Ukraine-born affiliate professor at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on Twitter that Mr. Cherkasov had been in his class and that he had written him a suggestion letter: “A strong one, in fact. Yes, me. I wrote a reference letter for a GRU officer. I will never get over this fact.” Mr. Finkel declined a request for remark.
The International Criminal Court mentioned that it was “very thankful to the Netherlands for this important operation and more generally for exposing security threats.”