Creating a new identity is perhaps the most important concern of Russia’ s so-called ‘illegals’ – as intelligence officers who work underground are known. Constructed step by step, without rushing to arouse suspicion and with attention to every detail, it is this cover story – in intelligence circles known as a ‘legend ‘ – that will allow them to fit in and go unnoticed in the social environment in which they are deployed to fulfil a mission, whatever it may be.
This is what Vladimir Aleksandrovich Danilov and Yekaterina Leonidovna Danilova, the Russian spy couple who passed through Portugal under the names Manuel Francisco Steinbruck Pereira and Adriana Carolina Costa Silva Pereira and whose identity was revealed last week by The New York Times, did for years – methodically and with utmost discretion. They first constructed a Brazilian identity and then a Portuguese one. And they would have succeeded if the Russian invasion of Ukraine hadn’t led Western intelligence services to redouble their efforts dismantling Russian spy cells.
The first record we could find of their presence in Brazil, with their new identities, dates back to February 2016. That month, Manuel Pereira, Vladimir Danilov’s alias, set up the company MP Collection, based in a building in Barra da Tijuca, Rio de Janeiro, dedicated to buying and selling antiques and second-hand items. At the same address, an art objects trading company was later registered in Adriana Pereira ‘s name. But it wasn’t until the two began to create a life – and a ‘legend’ – together that their businesses sprang to life.
According to the documents consulted by Euronews and Nascer do SOL, the construction of that life began on 14 April 2016. On the morning of that day, shortly after 10am, the two entered the Registry Office of the 12th Civil Registry in Rio de Janeiro. They waited their turn, handed over their identification documents and were taken to a room where Judge Salete dos Santos Norte was sitting.
He presented documents identifying him as Manuel Francisco Steinbruck Pereira, born on 24 November 1985, the son of Ligia Steinbruck, from Rio de Janeiro, and a Portuguese man, Camilo Pereira, from Vila Real. She showed documentation identifying her as Adriana Carolina Silva Costa, born on 5 June 1986, also in Rio de Janeiro, daughter of Juan Castro and Maria Paes.
Before the judge, they declared that they were there of their own free will to celebrate their marriage. When the documents were signed, the woman changed her name: she changed the order of her surnames and adopted her new husband’s family name. She was then called Adriana Carolina Costa Silva Pereira. The couple would then live in that building in Barra da Tijuca.
On the way to Portugal
It would be more than a year before the couple took another step towards building their identity. On 23 May 2017, Manuel Pereira went to the Portuguese consulate in Rio de Janeiro to register and apply for Portuguese nationality. To do this, according to the birth certificate obtained by Euronews and Nascer do SOL from the Lisbon Civil Registry Office, he presented a mandatory document for acquiring nationality: proof of the establishment of filiation when he was a minor, a declaration of which was made before a public official. In other words, a document allegedly signed by Camilo Pereira legally recognising Manuel Pereira’s paternity was presented.
A former court clerk who emigrated to Brazil many years ago, where he had three children, Camilo Pereira is now retired and living in Rio de Janeiro. In recent days, Euronews has tried to contact him by various means to find out if he has ever had contact with the two Russian spies. At his address in Lisbon, his family, one of his sons and his daughter-in-law didn’t want to talk about the case. He deleted or blocked his social media accounts after being approached by Euronews and Nascer do SOL.
Manuel Pereira’s birth certificate was to be filed with the Central Registry Office in Lisbon on 23 January 2018. Only then did the Russian spy move on to the next stage of the plan: obtaining Portuguese nationality for his wife. According to information gathered by Euronews and Nascer do SOL, it was then that the couple travelled to Portugal for the first time. They arrived in mid-February and stayed until March, when they returned to Brazil. On 26 April of that year, just over two years after their wedding, the couple once again went to the Portuguese consulate in Rio de Janeiro, this time to officially register their marriage.
They travelled to Portugal for the second time in October 2018. They returned again in 2019, by which time Adriana Pereira was already a Portuguese citizen under the terms of Article 3(1) of Law 37/81, which allows foreigners who have been married for more than three years to a Portuguese national to acquire Portuguese nationality.
According to the weekly Expresso, the two rented a flat in the Bonfim area of Porto. They entered and left Portugal several times until their false identities were unmasked.
The dismantling of the cell of Russian illegals in Brazil began when another spy was exposed by the American authorities as he was preparing to take up a trainee post at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Alerted by their American counterparts, the Dutch intelligence services prevented him from entering the country and sent him back to Brazil where he was arrested for falsifying documents. He was Sergey Cherkasov, a Russian intelligence officer who was travelling under the name Viktor Muller Ferreira and who, like Manuel Pereira, had a Portuguese father on his identity papers. On his return to Brazil, he was arrested and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
It was his arrest that alerted the Federal Police to the possibility that there were more illegals in Brazil. According to The New York Times, this is how the remaining eight members of the network were discovered. However, Euronews understands that it was not the Brazilian authorities who informed the Security Intelligence Service of the Russian couple’s presence in Portugal in the summer of 2022.
Having identified them, the Portuguese intelligence agency SIS took two steps. Firstly, it informed its Russian counterpart that the two illegals had been revealed. They then informed the Institute of Registries and Notaries IRN, which cancelled the identification documents and opened an investigation into how the nationality was obtained.
The importance of personal data
This information was placed on the respective birth certificates. However, the process has not yet been finalised. “When there is a decision, it has to be registered. If it is concluded that the process is null and void because it was false, the cancellation is recorded. If it is concluded that everything was fine with the seat, the process is cancelled,” explains a registrar who asked not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the subject. Euronews and Nascer do SOL questioned the IRN about the status of the cases, but there was no reply.
This is not the first time that Russian intelligence services have used or attempted to use identification data on nationals. One of the functions of spies placed undercover in Russian embassies around the world is to collect information on how different countries record and store personal data. They can also try to illegally obtain or forge documents whose information will be traceable to real people, living or dead, or fake individuals who exist only on paper.
This is what happened in Lisbon in 2013. An official from the Russian embassy began travelling frequently to the Central Registry Office (CRC) in Lisbon to meet with the same official, with whom he would meet for long periods of time. The then director of the IRN, António Figueiredo, alerted the SIS, which sent a team to try and find out on what the official had been consulting. The spies’ visit was eventually captured by PJ surveillance teams working on the gold visas at the time and caused controversy since Judge Carlos Alexandre didn’t believe the justifications given by António Figueiredo for the presence of the intelligence officers.
After these episodes, the SIS organised training for dozens of civil servants to alert them to the value of the information stored at the IRN for hostile foreign powers.
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