Researchers suspect that KGB agents, who worked in Brazil at the end of the Soviet Union, presented birth certificates of fictitious newborns so that a future generation of spies claim them someday.
When Federal Police agents unravel a espionage operation implemented by the Kremlin in Brazil, they faced a mystery: how did so many undercover spies achieved Brazilian birth certificates apparently authentic?
The police hoped to discover that the Russians had falsified the documents or bribed to municipal officials to create them and introduce them in the registry as if they were in the 1980s or 1990s.
But when the Forensic Report arrived in April, according to a senior Brazilian official, the analysis suggested something totally different. The documents did not seem false. And, most surprisingly, they were not even new.
Brazilian counter -spite officials are now considering a bolder possibility, with echoes of the Cold War. The researchers suspect that KGB agents, who worked incognito in Brazil during the last years of the Soviet Union, could have submitted birth certificates in the name of fictitious newborns, in the hope that a future generation of spies will claim them someday and continue the fight against the West.
If true, it would represent an extraordinary level of forecast and commitment to the mission by intelligence officers during a time of great agitation and unpredictability in the world. At the end of the 1980s, the communist bloc had begun to crumble, along with the ideological divisions that world politics had defined – and the mission of the spies of Moscow – for decades.
Almost overnight, the KGB, once an unparalleled force in world affairs, was deprived of its central purpose, the conflict with the West, and would soon be completely dissolved.
But such a vision of the future would fit with the culture of Russian espionage that, unlike the West, often values more long -term creative planning than immediate convenience. And in a country that is especially committed to the placement of officers in covert missions, obtaining birth certificates has long been a priority.
“It is the kind of things they would do,” said Edward Lucas, British author and an expert in Russian intelligence services. “It fits the meticulous and generational attention that they dedicate to creating these identities.”
However, in interviews, intelligence experts and officials of various Western intelligence services could not point out any other similar example in the history of Russian espionage. Some expressed their skepticism about the hypothesis. Even Brazilian researchers themselves still know what to do with the results of their forensic analysis. Meanwhile, the investigation continues.
The Brazilian courts have ordered that the birth certificates of the Russians suspected of acting as undercover agents be secret, so the Times could not analyze them independently.
Creating a convincing covert identity may be the most important work of a spy. For Russian elite secret agents, known as illegal, a hermetic background history can mean the difference between a heroic career and total failure. Unlike the West, where intelligence agents can adopt false identities for certain missions or periods of service, these spies are destined to live their cover, often for decades.
With their research, the Brazilian authorities broke what was essentially a assembly chain to create false identities. For years, and perhaps decades, the Russian agents had traveled to Brazil, not to spy, but to become Brazilians. They obtained passports, created companies, made friends and fell in love. Then, when their cover -ups were practically impregnable, they left for other countries to carry out espionage activities.
But the first crucial step was to obtain an authentic birth certificate. Historically, Moscow’s espionage services have focused a lot on that task. In his memoirs, Oleg Gordievsky, former KGB officer turned into a British agent, described his relentless search for birth games suitable for illegal operations. He told how, being destined in Denmark in the 1970s, he tried to recruit a priest who had access to a church book, in which births and deaths were registered.
“If we could access the books,” he wrote, “we could create any number of Danish identities.”
Whoever placed the birth certificates in Brazil paid great attention to details.
“The ink is normal, the page is fine,” said the Brazilian principal researcher. “There is no manipulation of books.” Like other officials, he requested anonymity because the investigation is still ongoing.
Although the documents seemed legitimate, the information they contained was false. The authorities discovered that the parents who appeared in the birth certificates did not exist or had never had children whose names coincided with those of the documents.
The researchers discovered that one of the birth certificates contained a rare slip, or perhaps a cunning wink of a generation of spies to the next. According to an official of the Western Intelligence Services, one of the parents who appeared in the document was the Brazilian alias of another undercover Russian agent who had worked in South America and Europe a generation before.
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Andrei Soldatov, author who is one of the greatest Russian experts in intelligence services, said he had never heard of officers who had falsified birth certificates so much in advance. But he said that would have been rewarded.
“If you contribute to the illegal program, you are in a very good position before your superiors,” he said. “It would be very good for your career.”