Thread by @christogrozev

Breaking: Norwegian authorities named the real identity of the fake "Brazilian researcher": his name is Mikhail Mikhushin, born 1978. This announcement is in line with what we, together with our investigative partners, had already discovered, and I will add some more details:

As a reminder, his cover identity was José Assis Giammaria (born 1984). It was clear that that was a fake identity, as we found that he first appeared on the horizon with that ID in 2006, when he applied for Brazilian passport and social security number claiming a BR mother.

(Mind you, 2006 is the year that at least three other GRU illegals - one of whom Maria Adela Kuhlfeld, or Olga Kolobova - obtained or tried to obtain South-American citizenship. The Peruvians caught "Kuhfeld"'s application and stopped the process, Brazil apparently was more lax).

But who was "Jose" in reality? We had a pretty good sense that he's a Russian citizen, and that his name is Mikhail. How did we know these two things? Because of his terrible opsec, as we will show you.

Our partners from @vgnett had found out the email account that "Jose" had used to apply for his university job. We then checked if this email had been breached before. It had (in a Linked-in breach in 2012), and we could find the password he had used for it.

So, we decided to check what other accounts had used the same password (and had been breached over the years). We found quite an interesting cluster of 24, 4 few of which stood out.

What was odd was that there were two accounts on Russian platforms. And both had words/concepts in the account name that were linked to Brazil or Portugese. AgrandeFamilia is/was a popular Brazilian sitcom. And Mika_Invasor literally means Mikhail The Invador. Great spy name!

(and btw, the mika-invasor email accounts had been used for ICQ and LiveJournal - which almost literally noone out of the former USSR has used in the last 15 years)

My favorite was probably this, however: using a now defunct email account, he had signed up for a DNA relative-tracing test at MyHeritage.com - incredible. Who did he expect to find? And what did the test show?

But back to our search for "Mikhail The Invador". A reverse face search in Russia's comprehensive passport system returned many lookalikes but not him. This meant either we're wrong that he's Russian, or that authorities had purged his passport file. We now know it's the latter.

So how do we know Norway's allegation of his name is correct? Well we got Mikhail's drivers' license photo. And here you go: Microsoft Azur (and our eyes) confirm it's the same person. Mikhail on the left, "Jose" on the right (literally and figuratively, check that T-shirt)

So we now know there's no Jose and the guy is a Russian spy called Mikhail Mikushin, 6 years older than his adopted identity (man, he wanted to be younger). But how do we know which intelligence service he is from? Let's check his address history in Russia.

Bingo! He was registered at the address of the dormitory of the GRU academy. Which means he's no less than a colonel! Great job, Norway - you've caught yourself a colonel from the GRU.

Not only did he get a free apartment at the coveted GRU academy residential quarters, but he's also wanted for unpaid property tax! You may invade the world, but in post-Soviet Russia, Tatyana from the Tax Office invades you.

What is also interesting is that he did travel back and forth to Russia, despite being deployed long-term undercover. (This is very different than the old, SVR illegals). For example, he was in Russia in June 2015 (seen from the date he got his drivers' license renewed).

Just 4 months later, he was campaigning for Canada's New Democratic Party.

He also visited Russia in June 2020, when he shopped at SegWave and EVEN left a raving review. He bought himself a scooter.

BTW, same as "Maria Adela", who traveled back from Italy to Russia each summer summer and then again around Christmas under false pretenses of "caring for her aged adoptive mother". So GRU's illegals were not fully deprived of visitation rights to home. bellingcat.com/news/2022/08/2…

A couple of follow-up questions that came up in the replies, I will try to answer in the thread:
Q. How did you find his name if his passport file was deleted?
A: They can only remove his passport file from the live database. Can't go back in time and delete already leaked data.

Q: How would the Norwegian authorities have found out his real ID?
A: Don't know but I'd guess they did a search of his home, and almost certainly he had his Russian ID docs with him, considering he sometimes travels to Russia, as we found out. Or they hacked his phone.

Q: You said he was a colonel but graduates of the GRU academy may be majors, or even captains.
A: True, but even a captain in 2006 would definitely be a colonel latest in 2019 (because of how Russian rank awards work). In fact illegals get 3:1 "time served" ratio, so even earlier