Russian Spy Tried to Infiltrate The Hague as an Intern, Here’s His Cover Story

Dutch spies stopped a Russian spy from getting a job as an intern at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, the Netherlands’ intelligence service announced on Thursday.

The AIVD, or General Intelligence and Security Service, accused Sergey Vladimirovich Cherkasov of pretending to be a Brazilian citizen named Viktor Muller Ferreira. He allegedly used a “well-constructed cover identity by which he concealed all his ties with Russia in general, and the [Russian military intelligence service] GRU in particular,” the press release read. 

Cherkasov was caught trying to enter the country, refused entry, and sent back to Brazil, according to the AIVD, which said the spy was a so-called “illegal”—an intelligence officer “who received a long and extensive training.” Such agents—comparable to U.S. intelligence agents working under non-official cover—are usually “difficult to discover” and “often remain undetected.”

The AIVD published Cherkasov’s cover story, which he used in his attempt to become an intern at the ICC. The story is head-scratching, meandering, and goes deep into his made-up family life—almost as in a Dr. Evil monologue. 

In the cover story, Cherkasov discusses his family history, including an extensive story about his father discovering that his mother died at birth, and then having his own father’s spouse refusing to adopt him. These made-up circumstances ended up with the father growing up with a tutor. Cherkasov said his mother was a musician who eventually died from pneumonia. Before that, she had issues with her husband and took care of Cherkasov alone. 

Cherkasov claimed to have grown up with a lot of “financial woes” and remembered a day when a neighboring boy knocked on the door and pretended to be the fairy tale character “Grey Shadow,” who “had come to devour me.”

“This scared me so much that I spent the entire day in a small box out on the balcony, praying, until my aunt came home,” the document read.   

The document then goes into painful and verbose detail about Cherkasov’s made-up school life and his first working experiences, starting with a job at a garage run by an “immensely fat” owner who was “notorious for his violent temperament.”

Then, the document covers Cherkasov’s made-up teenage years, talking about his first experiences picking up girls, and having a crush on a geography teacher, like everyone else in the class. Many of his schoolmate shared stories of seeing her do “a striptease,” or having sex with her, the document read.  

The cover story then gets into the death of his aunt, his consequent financial troubles, and dropping out of school at first, to then finish it eventually. At that point the document covers Cherkasov reunion with his estranged father, which did not end very well, but in the end, the document read, “I remain in touch with my father through the internet.”

It’s unclear why anyone would want to hire someone who presents such a cover story, and yet, Cherkasov “was supposed to commence an internship with the ICC, which would mean he would have access to the ICC's building and systems,” the AIVD wrote in the press release. 

Luckily, the Dutch intelligence caught him and prevented a disaster. 

“If the intelligence officer had succeeded in gaining access as an intern to the ICC, he would have been able to gather intelligence there and to look for (or recruit) sources, and arrange to have access to the ICC’s digital systems.,” the AIVD wrote. “That way he would have been able to provide a significant contribution to the intelligence that the GRU is seeking. He might also have been able to influence criminal proceedings of the ICC.” 

UPDATE, Jan. 16, 2:46 p.m. ET: This story has been corrected. The document published by AIVD was the spy’s cover story, not cover letter.

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