The region is a good spot to nurture spies
past 18 months suspected Russian spies have been unearthed in Europe, from the Netherlands to Norway and Sweden to Slovenia. Many have something in common: a link to the Americas. The arrests show that Latin America remains, as it was in the cold war, a springboard for Russian spies who go on to snoop around the United States and Europe.
“For many years, Canada was the place to go to get a passport,” says Kevin Riehle of Brunel University in London, who spent much of his career as a counter-intelligence analyst at the. The country’s passports were not only simple to acquire but also allowed easy travel to the United States and Europe. Canada also lacked centralised record-keeping, explains Stephanie Carvin of Carleton University in Ottawa, making it easy to assume the identity of dead Canadian babies.
But they may not use them to root out Russian spies. Many Latin American services have an attitude of benign neglect towards Russian skulduggery. Brazil’s police eventually investigated Mr Cherkasov’s activities and co-operated with the United States, handing over his electronic gear. But the government refused an American request to extradite the Russian and slashed his sentence from 15 to five years.