A deep-cover spy from Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, who spent a decade posing as a Latin American jewellery designer and partied with Nato staff based in Naples, had earlier been in Malta, investigators say.

A team of investigators claim to have unmasked a deep-cover spy from Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, who spent a decade posing as a Latin American jewellery designer and partied with Nato staff based in Naples, The Guardian reports.

The investigators say the woman went by the name of Maria Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera, and told people she met that she was the child of a German father and Peruvian mother, born in the city of Callao, Peru.

Posing as “Rivera”, the illegal moved between Rome, Malta and Paris, eventually settling in Naples, home of Nato’s Allied Joint Force Command, around 2013. She set up a jewellery boutique called Serein and led an active social life, The Guardian reports.

“Rivera” was what the intelligence community call an illegal, a deep-cover agent trained to pose as a foreigner. Moscow’s intelligence agencies have used illegals since the early Soviet period. Sometimes, they stay living in their fake identities for decades.

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Photo: The Guardian