A business owner living in Brazil who disappeared in January 2023 was revealed to be a deep-cover Russian illegal agent who is now likely back in Moscow. Gerhard Daniel Campos Wittich lived in Rio de Janeiro for more than five years, where he ran a 3D printing firm called 3D Rio. He claimed to be the son of an Austrian father and Brazilian mother, and grew up in Vienna, which explained his accented Portuguese. His company had contracts with Brazilian military and government organizations. When he disappeared, he was in the final stages of closing on a new commercial space located just down the street from the US Consulate in Rio. According to reporting by Shaun Walker in the Guardian, an Argentinian couple living in Slovenia were arrested in December 2022 and revealed to be Russian spies. Those arrests likely led Campos Wittich to be recalled by Moscow to avoid being arrested in a widening investigation. He told his girlfriend he would be attending a 3D printing convention in Malaysia, then disappeared in early January shortly after arriving in Kuala Lumpur. Weeks later, Greek media reported that a photographer named Maria Tsalla living in Greece was actually a Russian spy named Irina Alexandrovna Smireva and she was secretly married to another Russian spy named Artem Smirev, AKA Gerhard Campos Wittich. The married couple were living thousands of miles apart, carrying out separate missions, and building entirely separate lives from each other. A years-long investigation by Brazil’s intelligence community and law enforcement has identified at least nine Russian illegals who have used Brazilian identities to create their own legends. Many of them (including Campos Wittich AKA Smirev) were in the early stages of their decades-long missions when their new lives were disrupted by investigations and media revelations.