‘He runs and plays like the devil’ – How Putin’s spies used Ronaldo YouTube videos to send coded messages to Moscow
VLADIMIR PUTIN’S spies used Cristiano Ronaldo YouTube videos to send coded messages back to Moscow.
The incredible revelation came to light when a seemingly regular couple were jailed after being found guilty of spying for Russia in Germany.
To their neighbours in the town of Marburg, an hour north of Frankfurt in western Germany, Andreas and Heidrun Anschlag appeared to be a normal married couple.
They had Austrian passports, which turned out to be fake, and claimed to be citizens of the neighbouring nation with South American descent.
Andreas worked as a car engineer while Heidrun looked after the house and their daughter, who had no idea of her parents’ true identities.
Barring long phone calls in the garden during winter, a German journalist Mika Beuster said: “There was nothing that would distinguish them from any other family in the town.”
But for 23 years, they were paid £80,000 per year by Russia to spy on the West – starting before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.
Mr and Mrs Anschlag – whose real names are unknown – passed thousands of secrets to the Soviet Union and Russia, including from the EU, Nato and the UN.
They were aided by a mole at Dutch foreign ministry who sent monthly documents to be collected from so-called dead letter boxes while USB sticks were left in burrows for them to fetch.
The couple used radios and satellites to communicate with Moscow’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR.
But the rise of the internet gave ‘Pit’ and ‘Tina’ a new way of messaging their spymasters in broad digital daylight.
The Anschlags created a YouTube profile under the username @Aplenkuh1 – which translates as “Alpine cow 1” – in early 2011, with the Kremlin opening an account for themselves soon after called @crsitanofootballer.
According to the BBC’s former Security Correspondent Gordon Corera in his book Russians Among Us, the comments section of videos of then-Real Madrid hero Ronaldo playing football was a chosen forum for communication.
Corera writes: “The YouTube platform created another novel way of communicating.
“The couple and the SVR created accounts a couple of months apart in early 2011 which commented on videos, mainly about the footballer Cristiano Ronaldo.
“They wrote, ‘It’s a very nice video and the song is also very good.’
“This was answered by the SVR account called crsitanofootballer, saying, ‘He runs and plays like the devil.’
“This, German investigators believe, was a means of communicating by hiding in plain sight amid all the noise on the world’s largest video platform.
“The comments included a sequence of punctuation marks that could be turned into numbers which would then be referred back to a pre-agreed message.
“This was the next step on from the famous number stations, public radio broadcasts to spies and illegals in code, that have been used by the Russians as well as other countries for decades and can still be heard.”
The Anschlags were tracked by special intelligence forces and made a dramatic raid on their German home in October 2011.
It is understood Heidrun was receiving an encrypted message through a transmitter in their study when the authorities stormed in, causing her to fall off her chair in shock and pull the connection cable out.
The couple were sentenced in July 2013 – Andreas to six-and-a-half years in prison, Heidrun to five-and-a-half years – while the Dutch minister official got 12 years.
However, by the end of 2015, both spies had been freed from jail and deported to Russia.