The Boys from Brazil
By 
Folks in comments were alluding to this earlier… (sadly I have already gifted all my gift articles…
For years, a New York Times investigation found, Russia used Brazil as a launchpad for its most elite intelligence officers, known as illegals. In an audacious and far-reaching operation, the spies shed their Russian pasts. They started businesses, made friends and had love affairs — events that, over many years, became the building blocks of entirely new identities.
Major Russian spy operations have been uncovered in the past, including in the United States in 2010. This was different. The goal was not to spy on Brazil, but to become Brazilian. Once cloaked in credible back stories, they would set off for the United States, Europe or the Middle East and begin working in earnest.
The Russians essentially turned Brazil into an assembly line for deep-cover operatives like Mr. Shmyrev.
BRICS solidarity!
This is some Le Carre shit:
Brazilian counterintelligence officers are now considering a more audacious possibility, one with echoes of the Cold War. Investigators suspect that K.G.B. operatives, working undercover in Brazil during the last years of the Soviet Union, may have filed birth certificates in the names of fictitious newborns — hoping that a future generation of spies would someday claim them and continue the fight against the West.
If true, it would represent an extraordinary level of foresight and mission commitment by intelligence officers during a time of great upheaval and unpredictability in the world. By the late 1980s, the Communist bloc had begun to crumble, along with the ideological divisions that had defined global politics — and the mission of Moscow’s spies — for decades.
The Americans was evidently a documentary.
Photo Credit: By Rafael Rabello de Barros – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40647065