According to a joint investigation by The Insider, Le Monde and Der Spiegel, a 40-year-old Russian and FSB agent Kirill Griaznov, trained at a Parisian culinary school `Le Cordon Bleu`, was caught in Paris on July 19.
Griaznov was detained at his Paris flat on rue Saint-Denis. According to the Paris public prosecutor’s office, the investigation resulted in the discovery of “diplomatic material”. Kirill Griaznov was charged with “intelligence with a foreign power with a view to stirring up hostilities in France”, a crime punishable by thirty years imprisonment.
One million background checks have been conducted on Olympic volunteers and other participants, and those applying for passes. As a result, about 5,000 people have been blocked from attending, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said on Tuesday. He added: “There are 1,000 people whom we suspect of foreign interference, we can say spying.”
Griaznov’s leaked emails show that he is too loose-lipped when drunk, and that’s how he was caught. In May, while enjoying a beach-side meal in Bulgarian Varna, he indulged in too much alcohol and revealed that he was tasked with disrupting the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Paris. Witnesses told The Insider that Kirill showed off his FSB ID.
The investigation revealed that Gryaznov was suspected of allegedly recruiting Moldovans, who are concerned with the spray-painting Stars of David across Paris. Earlier In November, a Moldovan couple linked to agents of the FSB’s Fifth Service was arrested.
Kirill’s brother, Dmitri Griaznov, shares a personal driver with Andrey Chekanov, an officer in the GRU. An intriguing fact is that Chekanov lives in the same residential building with Denis Sergeev, a top member of the assassination and sabotage group known as Unit 29155. Sergeev also served as the operational commander responsible for overseeing the attempt to poison Skripals in Salisbury, England in 2018.
Griaznov’s professional background as a covert agent disguised as a chef bears striking resemblance to that of Vitalii Kovalev, a military electronics engineer from Russia, who abruptly resigned from his military career, underwent two-month culinary training in St. Petersburg, and began working in local restaurants.
Kovalev then settled and worked as a chef in New York and Washington, D.C., and, like Griaznov, appeared on TV shows. Kovalev was arrested in 2020, when he was stopped by police in Florida. He had a trunk full of curious surveillance and signaling gear in his car. Kovalev was later identified as a GRU technical officer seconded to the FSB’s 16th Directorate, a cyber unit.
Security concerns should prompt more thorough examinations of cooking schools and similar instructional programs, and it might be worth considering strictly banning Russians from participating in international culinary training initiatives.
