The dark hair, swept over one shoulder, transcended her girl next door appearance. The beguiling tilt of her head and the smile that lit up her face, made it easy for Maria to start a conversation over drinks, turning a seemingly chance meeting into a friendship.
Maria would travel from her base in Malta to Rome for her gemmology studies. Maria Rivera, from Peru, would enjoy the climate of Malta, including the summer heat for the two years she lived on the island with her boyfriend. Staying in Malta would help the Peruvian to assimilate into the Mediterranean conditions and more readily adapt to its lifestyle, than could Olga Kolobova, her real-life identity. Kolobova was secretly an agent for GRU, the Russian military intelligence service, who would use the Latin persona in Malta to launch her espionage assignments.
As Maria Adela Rivera, she used Malta as an entry point into European society before she set up base in Italy as a jewellery designer. Under the cover of a complicated back story as Maria Adela, Olga Kolobova would proceed to become close to officers of the US Navy and attaches from several countries, who worked at the NATO base in Naples, Italy.
An investigation by Bellingcat, and its newspaper partners, has identified “Maria Adela Rivera” as the Russian spy who was active in Europe until 2018. The Bellingcat investigation revealed her true identity during investigations into the two GRU agents who had been involved in the poisoning of Russian dissident Sergey Skripal and his daughter, in Salisbury, the UK in 2018.
Social media posts show Maria Adela living in Malta with her boyfriend, in the period between 2009 and 2011. Having befriended people in Malta, including gaining the confidence of a former editor of the UK edition of Cosmopolitan magazine, she was able to integrate into European society. Travelling between Malta and Rome, the agent would eventually set up a jewellery store, Serein, in Naples and become a fixture on the social scene hosting large parties and becoming a member of the local Lions Club.
Using a complicated back story of a Peruvian child abandoned in Moscow during the 1980 Olympics, Maria Adela Rivera went onto charm and befriend several people close to military and strategic operations, before her secretive exit to Moscow.
Maria Adela is not the first spy to use Malta from which to conduct their secret operations.
Malta’s location in the centre of the Mediterranean makes it an ideal place from which spies and espionage forays can be conducted. Malta, with its alliances and strategic positioning, is the perfect place to discreetly conduct operations or be a communications point.
For such a small island, the size of some embassies raises a suspicion that much more could be taking place behind their closed gates.
The French did not even need an embassy, instead agents used an ordinary looking terraced house in residential Balzan. Around 2016, French secret service agents used Malta as a base to monitor the delivery of weapons to Libya. The secret operation came to light following the mysterious crash of a plane in Malta, when the crash victims were identified as members of the DGSE, France’s external intelligence agency. The flight was passed off as an accident involving French Customs, but later details dismissed this as a ruse. An investigation by Maltese authorities identified that the Balzan house was the base for a covert operation. During the inquiry into the crash, the magistrate described the operation as being like a classic spy film, of agents sitting behind their computers in a darkened room in the house, who would receive “live footage” from the aircraft and process the information to the French secret service. The investigation raised the possibility that the French had been conducting surveillance missions for some time.
Such French spying on the island had not been so brazen since when Napoleon inserted spies into Malta to surveil the Knights of St John!
Over much of its history many nations used Malta as a base for their own purposes. The British used Malta during the Cold War as a place to train spies, away from the gaze of the Communists, or so they thought.
The parents of popular British/Irish singer Chris de Burgh, singer of Lady in Red fame, trained British spies in Malta. Charles and Maeve Davidson moved to Malta in 1951 settling in the township of Rabat. The couple, on behalf of the British intelligence services, trained spies, ahead of a deployment in Albania, as part of ‘Operation Valuable’. The operation was an early Cold War attempt to overthrow the communist regime in Albania.
The mission ultimately ended in tragedy when the agents they trained were discovered by the Albanian authorities and executed. Suspicions were, the famous double spy Kim Philby, was leaking information. Philby was the Davidsons’ controller in the Mediterranean.
Far from only hosting foreign spies, Malta has its own spying history. During the second world war, Carmelo Borg Pisani, a Maltese national, developed strong pro-Italian sentiment and had been studying art in Rome when war broke out. Borg Pisani wrote to Mussolini and eventually joined the ‘black shirts’- the fascist militia before joining the Italian intelligence unit. He volunteered for an espionage mission to Malta, to check British defences and help prepare for the planned invasion by Axis forces. Crossing from Italy in rough seas, he landed at the planned landing position at Dingli cliffs. Pisani was captured after the rations he had stored in a cave, that he had explored in his youth, were washed out by the inclement weather. Unable to climb the steep cliffs he was taken into custody and eventually tried. Pisani was executed for treason in 1942 at Corradino Prison.
Mussolini named Pisani as the “Maltese Martyr”.
Pisani was not the first and Maria Adela Rivera will not be the last spy, to use the small Mediterranean island as a convenient base for covert operations. As a home to 25 embassies who knows how many spies are on the island right now?
This article was published in the Maltese Journal edition #445
In real-life and fiction Malta has been a home for spies. James Bond (Roger Moore) visited Malta when filming ‘The spy who loved me’ and the recent series ‘To Catch a Spy’ was also filmed in Malta.
