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The Hague:
The Dutch intelligence service stated Thursday it had stopped a Russian spy posing as an intern from infiltrating the Worldwide Prison Courtroom, which is investigating conflict crimes in Ukraine.
The person, recognized as Sergey Vladimirovich Cherkasov, 36, travelled to the Netherlands in April utilizing a fastidiously constructed deep cowl as a Brazilian citizen to take up his internship on the Hague-based tribunal.
However the Russian was unmasked as an agent of Moscow’s GRU navy intelligence service and refused entry to the Netherlands earlier than being placed on the subsequent accessible flight again, the Dutch stated.
Had he not been stopped, Cherkasov might have accessed “extremely invaluable” intelligence on the ICC’s probe into conflict crimes in Ukraine and even influenced prison proceedings, they added.
“The risk posed by this intelligence officer is deemed doubtlessly very excessive,” the Dutch AIVD, or Basic Intelligence and Safety Service, stated in a press release.
The pinnacle of the Dutch intelligence service, Erik Akerboom, stated it was “very uncommon” to catch a Russian agent “of this calibre”.
“The GRU has spent years creating this faux identification. It is an unlimited effort,” he was quoted as saying by the Dutch ANP information company.
‘Cowl identification’
The Russian was a so-called “unlawful” — spy parlance for an agent who has lived overseas below a faux identification for years and is subsequently “troublesome to find”, the Dutch intelligence service stated.
He travelled to the Netherlands below the identify of a 33-year-old Brazilian citizen named Viktor Muller Ferreira, utilizing a “well-constructed cowl identification by which he hid all his ties with Russia usually, and the GRU particularly”.
However the Dutch pinpointed him as a “risk to nationwide safety” and notified the immigration service.
“On these grounds the intelligence officer was refused entry into the Netherlands in April and declared unacceptable. He was despatched again to Brazil on the primary flight out,” the AIVD stated.
The Russian’s internship would have given him entry to the ICC’s constructing and techniques at a time when it’s probing conflict crimes in Ukraine, together with alleged Russian crimes for the reason that February 24 invasion.
“For these causes, covert entry to Worldwide Prison Courtroom info can be extremely invaluable to the Russian intelligence companies,” the AIVD stated.
Had the Russian spy succeeded “he would have been in a position to collect intelligence there and to search for (or recruit) sources, and organize to have entry to the ICC’s digital techniques,” it added.
“He may also have been in a position to affect prison proceedings of the ICC.”
‘Necessary operation’
In scenes that might have come from a spy novel, the Dutch even launched a four-page doc setting out the Russian spy’s “legend” or cowl identification.
They stated it was possible written by Cherkasov himself in Portuguese in round 2010.
The extremely detailed doc contains tales about his background, together with his supposedly troubled relationship together with his mother and father, his hatred of fish, his crush on a trainer, the truth that he was nicknamed “Gringo” as a result of he “appeared like a German”.
It even contains full addresses of a restaurant in Brasilia with the “finest brown stew on the town” and a trance music membership, in an obvious try and again up his cowl story.
However the Dutch commentary with the doc notes drily: “The Portuguese textual content accommodates a number of (grammar) errors, presumably as a result of Portuguese shouldn’t be Cherkasov’s native language,” it says.
The ICC thanked the Dutch for exposing the spy however gave few different particulars of the incident.
“The Worldwide Prison Courtroom was briefed by the Dutch authorities and may be very grateful to The Netherlands for this vital operation and extra typically for exposing safety threats,” spokeswoman Sonia Robla stated in a press release to AFP.
There was no instant response from Russia.
The Dutch have a historical past of exposing Russian intelligence operations on their soil, and notably in The Hague the place dozens of worldwide courts and organisations are based mostly.
In 2018 the Netherlands expelled 4 alleged Russian GRU spies whom it accused of attempting to hack the worldwide chemical weapons watchdog whereas it was investigating assaults in Syria.
(Apart from the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is revealed from a syndicated feed.)
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