MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Russian spy in Italy claimed she had been born in Peru

Olga vanished into thin air since her cover became shaky in 2018

A Russian female spy posing as a socialite allegedly born in Peru had infiltrated a NATO base in Italy for years, it was reported Friday.

The “self-confident thirty-something woman who speaks six languages” had infiltrated NATO circles and the 6th US Fleet in Naples, Italy. Her case went public through a media investigation.

She carried a Russian passport from the “same series” used by the military secret service, according to the journalistic investigation.

The woman called herself Maria Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera, born in Peru, with a German father, but subsequent investigations have identified her as Olga Kolobova, a Russian agent and daughter of a Russian colonel.

Kuhfeldt Rivera's trail was lost when in September 2018 she left Naples for Moscow without a trace after the names of the Russian spies who tried to poison former agent Sergey Skripal and Bulgarian arms producer Emil Gebrev were published in local media.

Her achievements as an intelligence officer could not be determined, but it was proved that she had come “into contact with key figures in NATO and the US Navy.”

Kolobova posed as a jewelry designer socialite to honeytrap NATO staff in Naples until 2018. She had told people in Italy that she was the child of a German father and a Peruvian mother, born in the city of Callao, Peru. According to Bellingcat in joint work with La Repubblica in Italy and Der Spiegel in Germany, she was indeed a career GRU officer from Russia.

Maria Adela spent years traveling across Europe, settling in Malta and Rome in 2010 where she became friends with Marcelle D'Argy Smith, a former Cosmopolitan magazine editor, before taking off for Paris and filing a patent application to launch a jewelry business.

She married a Russian-Ecuadorian man after moving back to Italy in 2012, but their romance ended soon, when the man died in unclear circumstances, after which the allegedly Peruvian-born Maria made a name for herself as a custom jeweler and nightclub owner.

Kolobova, who is currently believed to be in her mid-40s, was a member of Russia's famed “illegals” program, a network of spies who go through years of rigorous training to get them ready for long-lasting postings overseas.

Once ready, illegal immigrants are placed in a nation and given expertly designed false identities, where they spend years or even decades leading double lives.

Kolobova is the daughter of a Russian military officer who used to sell counterfeit jewelry made in China to entice European and American security professionals to unintentionally leak classified information.

Investigators found that a Russian intelligence operative engaged in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and a man suspected of poisoning Bulgarian armaments producer Emilian Gebrev both shared the same set of fake passport numbers.

The final Facebook post made by “Maria” a few months after she left Italy stated that she had to “reveal the truth” that she had cancer and had undergone chemotherapy.