In the months after the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal, British intelligence agencies were able to piece together the GRU’s operations, not only in the UK but across Europe.

Skripal, a GRU colonel who had sold secrets to MI6, survived the attempt on his life in March 2018 after two Russian agents travelled to Salisbury and tried to poison him with Novichok nerve agent that also left his daughter seriously ill.

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Believing her cover blown, Maria Adela bought a one-way plane ticket from Naples to Moscow and retreated back to Russia in 2018. Her close friends in the west have never seen her since.

Among them was Marcelle D’Argy Smith, the former editor of the women’s magazine Cosmopolitan, whom Maria Adela befriended in Malta in 2010 where the journalist had a flat. On Friday, D’Argy Smith was coming to terms with Bellingcat’s revelation that the younger woman she had thought of as a ‘niece’ or ‘goddaughter’ was actually an agent working for Vladimir Putin.

Maria Adela had told D’Argy Smith, 70, that she was born in Peru in 1978, the love child of a German father and Peruvian mother, but astonishingly enough had been abandoned in the Soviet Union in 1980. Her mother had attended the Moscow Olympics and then left her there to be adopted by Russian foster parents.

Her money, Maria Adela would explain, came from a wealthy married Russian man with whom she had had an affair and who had died leaving her an inheritance.

According to Bellingcat, the GRU created Maria Adela’s fake persona in Peru, trying to register her as a citizen with a date of birth of September 1 1978. In fact Maria Adela was born in 1982, the daughter of a colonel in the Russian military, suspected of being a senior officer in the GRU. Maria Adela, it appears, had entered the family line of business, groomed from an early age to be a spy.

“I have zero interest in spies; I don’t bother with James Bond films,” said D’Argy Smith yesterday, clearly shaken by the revelation and having helped Bellingcat with its investigation, “But we were such really good friends. She was like a god-daughter or a niece. It was upsetting to find out. She was very beautiful, very understated. I didn’t think other women liked her because they realised she could, if she chose, be a threat.

“She had lots of male friends but they never seemed worthy. She was so attractive and the men looked ordinary and I never understood it.”

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From Malta, Maria Adela moved to Ostia, just outside Rome, taking classes in jewellery making. She would criss-cross Europe, taking the train from Moscow to Paris via Belarus, travelling on a passport that would later prove her undoing. The Russian passport was a fake and issued by the GRU.

In Paris in 2011, she set up her first jewellery business under the brand name Serein. Bellingcat believes this was the “likely seeding phase” of the GRU’s long-term plan to deploy their asset as a “socialite and businesswoman”.

A year later, Maria Adela married in secret an Italian man with Russian and Ecuadorian passports. D’Argy Smith was sent photographs of the wedding, her friend dressed in a strapless wedding dress, her black hair swept back.

Within 12 months, the husband had died in Moscow, his death at the age of 30 registered on July 13 2013 and the death certificate recording double pneumonia and lupus, a potentially debilitating disease but which affects women more than men.

After the wedding, Maria Adela made her move back to Italy, setting up her jewellery company Serein SRL, describing herself as a trader in jewellery and luxury goods. Later that year she flew to Bahrain, a posting on Facebook showing her meeting His Royal Highness Prince Khalifa bin Slman Al Khalifa, the country’s then prime minister. There were also trips to the UK, and on one occasion Maria Adela stayed overnight with a prominent British family at their stately home. One branch of the family has been a serious donor to the Conservative Party although The Telegraph understands that British intelligence agencies do not believe she was ever active in the UK.

By 2015, Maria Adela had moved into a large apartment overlooking the Bay of Naples in one of the city’s more ‘elegant’ postcodes.

Bellingcat says that over the next three years Maria Adela’s espionage career ‘peaked’. D’Argy Smith remembers her friend picking her up from Naples airport in a “very flashy car, maybe an Audi convertible; this beautiful dark-haired woman wearing the most expensive leather jacket and I kept thinking: ‘Most men would kill to be me right now’.”

Maria Adela opened a boutique in Naples selling her branded Serein jewellery, the website claiming it bespoke and ‘made in Napoli”. In fact, according to Bellingcat, the jewellery was cheap stuff bought from Chinese wholesalers, and as much of a con as the woman selling it. D’Argy Smith described the set up as “amateurish”.

In the same year, Maria Adela became secretary of the fundraising charity Lions Club Napoli Monte Nuovo, first established as a branch of the Lions club by a NATO officer. Energetic and committed, the GRU officer even offered to pay members’ fees to encourage joiners and bump up the numbers.

Through the club, the spy, who spoke fluent Italian and English with a discernible Russian accent, “befriended a number of NATO officers”. One of them, who has not been identified, admitted to Bellingcat that he had had a “brief romantic relationship” with her. In an email to D’Arcy Smith, she wrote that a US Navy employee, who was a photographer, had “a little crush” on her. Another NATO employee said to be ‘close’ to her worked in data systems. NATO declined to comment on intelligence matters.

The spy also became friends with Colonel Sheila Bryant, the then Inspector General for the US Naval Forces in Europe and Africa. Bryant told Bellingcat that she thought Maria Adela’s backstory was “confusing and unconvincing” and questioned “why would anyone abandon their child in the Soviet Union?”

Colonel Bryant was also mystified by the source of her wealth and as a result kept communications to arms length subjects of “social interaction” that usually involved Maria Adela discussing her “emotional issues with men”. During this time, the spy received invitations to all sorts of NATO or US military events, including balls and fundraising dinners. NATO employees would pop into the jewellery store and buy goods there.

In the wake of the Skripal poisoning in 2018, GRU’s operations had been exposed, their dealings uncovered by work carried out by MI5, MI6, GCHQ and foreign intelligence agencies. Within six months, the authorities in the UK had a pretty good handle on GRU foreign operations both in Britain and across Europe. Maria Adela made a hurried exit.

In the following three years, she stayed in touch with her friends. As recently as last December, she sent Marcelle D’Argy Smith a message on WhatsApp that read: “Dearest dearest Marcelle!. There are [a] lot of things which I can’t (and never be able) to explain! But missing you a lot and very very much...”

The message was seemingly heartfelt, the closest the spy had come to a confession in the decade the Russian agent and the former Cosmo editor had been friends. “I don’t feel betrayed by her,” said D’Argy Smith last night, “She is very resilient, very smart and a lateral thinker but once too often I saw her in tears. There was a vulnerability although it was never her undoing.”

Telegraph, London

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