Credit: Dangerous Minds / Bellingcat

During the early pages of one of the great works of American literature, The Great Gatsby, there’s a scene in which a number of party-goers gossip over who exactly the titular Gatsby is, with ever-outlandish speculation about his identity.

There are some who think he’s a murderer, others who believe he’s a patriot, and even a group that thinks he spent the Great War in America or in Europe. The ultimate example of ridiculous speculation is the idea that Gatsby is a spy. It turns out that F Scott Fitzgerald shouldn’t have been so dismissive of speculation like that, as, nearly a century after his masterpiece was published, a rich socialite who threw the best parties in town was actually exposed as exactly that.

In this case, it was a woman allegedly named Maria Adela Rivera – supposedly, she was a Peruvian national who ran a jewellery line. In 2013, Rivera found herself conducting business in Naples shortly after the death of her husband, and if she was heartbroken about this loss, she had a strange way of showing it. She expanded her jewellery line, making brand deals with people across the globe and throwing rowdy parties at the clubs she ran in the most exclusive parts of town.

Perhaps some people put it together that several of her clients, and more than a few of her romantic trysts, came from people with suspiciously close ties to NATO generals stationed in nearby areas. However, that must have been a coincidence. This was just a girlboss girlbossing it in the highest strata of the Naples highlife – if you do business with the elite, then you’ll just naturally come across other members of the elite, right?

Yeah, no… Unlike Gatsby, who was a bootlegger and a romantic at heart, Maria Adela Rivera actually was a spy, but like her fictional counterpart, both operated under pseudonyms.

How do we know this? Bafflingly enough, one of the biggest Russian spy operations in the world was rumbled because of her cat. Rivera wasn’t operating entirely under the radar while she was in Naples, especially when a little digging on her jewellery line revealed that she was selling what appeared to be knock-off goods. That could have been nothing more than common-or-garden scam-artistry, and the jewellery industry isn’t short of a few of those.

What blew the investigation wide open, carried out mainly by Bellingcat, Der Spiegel, The Insider and La Repubblica, was Rivera’s beloved cat, Luisa. In 2022, when the investigators were looking for any dirt on Rivera, they found the 15-digit code on Luisa’s ISO-compliant microchip that gave her license to travel across the European Union. After plugging this code into several databases, they found that Luisa was registered to several other vets in the world. The earliest registration was to a vet’s office in Moscow, and what’s more, the person who registered her there still had her social media pages up.

This person was Olga Kolobova. Kolobova’s social media activity dried up in the mid-2010s, when Rivera first arrived on the European scene. It was also decisively pro-Putin, and, the smoking gun to end all smoking guns, she was the absolute spit of Rivera. Before this was even reported by the press, Rivera had disappeared from Naples, with all that was left of her being a one-way plane ticket to Moscow booked, and what’s more, several other suspicious people in her orbit also disappeared off the face of the planet at the same time.

That’s right, an errant cat was the key to bringing down a Kremlin spy ring active in the heart of Europe – one wonders whether a mind like Fitzgerald’s could have seen that coming.