Michelin Red Star: The Insider reveals identity of arrested Russian chef-agent who planned “destabilizing” acts at Paris Olympic Games

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This is a joint investigation with Le Monde and Der Spiegel.

Being trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, Kirill Griaznov fondly recalled, was “not just learning gastronomy, but also art de vivre.”

Now this 40 year-old chef of haute cuisine, who legally resided in France for over a decade, faces a French judicial investigation into his alleged work on behalf of foreign intelligence, specifically the FSB, Russia’s domestic security service. His mission, according to the French investigators, was “to incite hostilities in France.” Instead, a drink-soaked attempt to brag about his important operation led to his unmasking.

Griaznov was arrested at his Paris home on July 19 with “diplomatic material,” according to the city’s prosecutor, and charged four days later. If convicted, he faces 30 years behind bars.

French authorities say he was planning a “large-scale” operation that might have had “serious” consequences.

His detention comes at an incredibly tense moment for French authorities, already dealing with a spate of provocations or abortive terrorist operations cooked up in Moscow. Most of these have been linked to France’s robust military and diplomatic support for Ukraine’s war effort. But on July 26, the Summer Olympics are set to begin in Paris and security measures have been enormous, with tens of thousands of police mobilized and a million people vetted for access to the games’ most well-guarded venues. According to the Associated Press, 5,000 people have already been barred from attending the Olympics, a fifth of them suspected “of foreign interference — we can say spying,” in the words of the French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin.

The Olympics were indeed Griaznov’s target, according to a joint investigation by The Insider, Le Monde and Der Spiegel. “The French,” he told his FSB superior two months ago, “will have an opening ceremony like no other.”

For a highly trained Russian operative, possibly one looking to cause havoc at an international sporting event, Griaznov hardly looks the part. His Instagram is awash with food porn, selfies of him in tailored suits or fur coats, and trippy reels of him at work in the kitchen cooking Ramen and spoofing the Turkish cooking influencer Salt Bae.

He also published his haute cuisine recipes for a magazine affiliated with Lenta.com, a kind of Russian Wal-Mart. “The most unpleasant thing about working with cherries,” he observed, “is removing the pits.”

In his pudgier, bespectacled days, Griaznov even experimented with reality TV, starring in a Russian dating series called “Choose Me,” modeled on ABC’s The Bachelor, where he billed himself as a “successful businessman and restaurateur.”

That is more debatable than another characteristic. He’s an alcoholic and very indiscreet in his cups — or so say a succession of ex-girlfriends who terminated their relationship with him on that account, Griaznov’s leaked emails show. One of his former partners went as far as to caution him, upon breaking up, that “alcohol will get to you one day.” Loose-lipped inebriation, as it happens, is exactly how Griaznov was caught.

On May 7, he was in Russia and due to fly from Moscow to Istanbul, where he’d catch a connecting flight back to Paris the next day. Except he couldn't. He got so fall-down drunk at Istanbul Airport that he was barred from boarding his plane. Instead Griaznov took a taxi to the Bulgarian border, where another car delivered him to St. Vlas, a resort town on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria, where Griaznov owns property.

Griaznov stayed at his apartment for a few days before moving on to Varna, a Bulgarian city 60 miles north of St. Vlas. From there he flew on to Paris. During one of his beach-side dinners he got drunk again and let slip to the neighbors that he had a special assignment this summer in Paris to disrupt the opening ceremony of the Olympics. At first the neighbors were incredulous. That’s when Griaznov brandished his FSB ID, witnesses told The Insider. A few days later, Griaznov made his way to Varna and took a flight from there. Before flying to Paris, Griaznov made a call to his FSB boss and informed him that the operation was on track. Griaznov even said he’d recruited “one more Moldovan from Chisinau.”

This detail, too, will have caught the eye of French investigators.

In November, a Moldovan couple was arrested in Paris for stenciling or spray-painting Stars of David across the city, stoking fears of anti-Semitism in the midst of the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza. The couple was later linked to agents of the FSB’s Fifth Service, its foreign intelligence arm. They were paid between 300 and 500 euros for the operation. While there is no evidence connecting Griaznov to that or any prior Russian psychological or propaganda effort in France, one Western intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told The Insider that Moldovans are cheap and easy to recruit. “It’s one of the poorest countries in Europe and their ability to travel unimpeded from Moldova to anywhere else in Europe is a big boon for Russian spies who can’t,” the official said.

In the intervening period, other Russian plots and agents have been exposed in France. One involved the laying of coffins in front of the Eiffel Tower, draped in French flags that read “French soldiers of Ukraine” – a provocation seemingly in response to French President Emmanuel Macron’s controversial hypothetical scenario about eventually deploying French troops to Odesa. In June, Maxim Dvirnik, a 26-year-old Russo-Ukrainian, injured himself in the face and body while constructing an explosive in his hotel room near Charles de Gaulle airport. Dvirnik’s abortive mission was to place his homemade bomb at a Bricorama store, a famous French hardware and decoration chain. He was charged with “criminal terrorist association” and the “possession of substances or explosives with the intent to prepare destruction or harm to persons in relation to a terrorist enterprise.”

Griaznov's background as a chef, an increasingly common cover identity or “legend” for Russian intelligence assets, also seems to have been carefully orchestrated, going back more than a decade. It seemingly appeared out of the blue following years spent in a more lucrative career.

According to Griaznov’s résumé, which The Insider obtained, in the early 2000s he attended law school in his hometown of Perm, Russia, and only learned to cook in 2010 at Le Cordon Bleu Paris, the celebrated French culinary academy. Three years earlier, Griaznov worked for Hoogewerf & CIE and OCRA Worldwide, two Luxembourg-based companies that provided legal and financial consulting services. In 2011 Griaznov relocated to Courchevel, a posh ski town in the French Alps, where he had an internship in the kitchen of K2, a Michelin-starred restaurant favored by Russian elites.

To his French friends, contacted by Le Monde, Griaznov never mentioned his previous career in finance in Moscow and Luxembourg. In a conversation with Le Monde, Victor, an old friend of Griaznov, said he was shocked: “I know his whole family and vice-versa. I went to his house in Moscow and Perm. He came to France because he hates Putin and does not want to go to the front [in Ukraine], lol”.

Six months later, on September 9, 2012, Griaznov received an email from Viviane H., the owner of the apartment he rented in the Second Arrondissement of Paris. She was checking in on him. In his response, he noted without elaborating that he’d gone back to Moscow to work as an “official” in the “Russian government.” Nowhere in Griaznov’s CV is any Russian government job listed.

His brother, Dmitri, with whom Griaznov owns the real estate in St. Vlas, does serve as chief of staff at the secretariat of the Belarus-Russia Union Assembly, a latent legislative body for the future Russian-Belarusian “union state” – Moscow’s de facto annexation of its neighbor – which the Kremlin has for years tried to implement. That body is typically staffed with FSB officers. Moreover, The Insider was able to establish based on phone records that Dmitri Griaznov shares a personal driver with Andrey Chekanov, an officer of the GRU, or Russia’s military intelligence agency. Chekanov lives in Moscow at Zorge 36, the same building where another GRU spy resides: Denis Sergeev, a top-ranking member of the assassination and sabotage squad known as Unit 29155. Sergeev was the operational commander overseeing the failed attempt to fatally poison Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, England in 2018.

Kirill Griaznov also has some curious correspondence in his email inbox, which The Insider gained access to in the course of this investigation. One of these, dated 2009, is a confidential military dossier on Maj. Andrey Belyashov, a GRU airborne Spetsnaz, or special forces, officer who fought in the Second Chechen War – not a typical document attachment lingering in the inbox of an ordinary lawyer-turned-cook.

In another email, dated April 11, 2008, during Griaznov’s stint in Luxembourg, he excitedly wrote, in English, to Lord Robert Skidelsky, a British peer, “I’m so pleased that I’ve met you yesterday! Hope to meet you soon in Moscow! We have a lot of things to talk about! Waiting for your reply!”

Skidelsky replied the same day: “I too was happy to meet you – do vskoroi strechi [until next time]. I’m in Moscow 13-15 and 22-24 April and again in June.” However, it appears no meeting took place during that time period, as Griaznov did not write back again until September 24, 2008, referring only to their Luxembourg encounter and informing Skidelsky, again in exclamatory sentences, that he was now in Moscow and hoping to meet up.

Skidelsky, who is of Russian heritage, is an economic historian and biographer who in 1991 became Baron Skidelsky of Tilton in the County of East Sussex. He was suspended from the House of Lords in November 2023 after failing to declare his ties to a think tank financed by Russian oligarchs, Mikhail Gutseriev and his son Said, both of whom are under European Union and British government sanctions for supporting a brutal crackdown on pro-democratic protests in Belarus by Alexander Lukashenko, the country’s longtime dictator. Skidelsky has criticized London’s support for Ukraine in its defensive war against Russia’s full-scale invasion and endorsed its balkanization along ethnolinguistic lines. He also opposed Sweden and Finland’s recent NATO accession.

The Insider reached out to Skidelsky for comment but did not hear back in time for publication.

Griaznov’s direct ties to the Russian special services are also apparent from his emails and travel patterns.

In 2019, flight records show, he took a plane from his native Perm to Moscow on a ticket that was purchased for him by Col. Vladimir Bondarchuk, the former chief inspector of FSB Unit 53916, the service’s internal security department.

Maybe innocently or maybe as a trolling exercise, on his public Facebook page, Griaznov posted a photo of himself outside the KGB Museum in Prague, as well as a few inside it, where he stands next to a bust of Josef Stalin and holds antique pistols and rifles while wearing a Soviet secret policeman’s hat.

Griaznov also, it seems, visited the United States.

In January 2013, Griaznov checked in on Facebook at the Hudson Hotel on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the Columbus Circle neighborhood. On that trip he also apparently dined at the high-end Italian restaurant Marea, off Central Park South, posting that the “special thing about New York: on Saturday night you can go to a restaurant without reservations, with a lot of free tables, a great interior, reasonable prices, great food and a bonus in the form of 2 Michelin stars.”

Leaked emails also show that in November 2017, on another whirlwind trip to America, Griaznov attended a Marinsky Orchestra concert at Carnegie Hall and took in a Knicks v. Nets game. He also spent a day of “drift fishing” in Miami. His travel itinerary was global, with long stretches in France, Switzerland, Czechia and Bulgaria, along with shorter ones in the United Kingdom, China and India.

Such exhilarating freedom of movement came to an abrupt end last week.

At six in the morning on July 19, France’s Search and Intervention Brigade entered the apartment he rented on Rue Saint-Denis in the Second Arrondissement of Paris. According to information gathered by Le Monde, the raid took place under the legal framework of an “administrative home visit” targeting individuals deemed dangerous or suspicious. A judicial investigation opened by the Paris prosecutor's office charged Griaznov on July 23 for “intelligence with a foreign power to incite hostilities in France.” He has since been placed in provisional detention.

Griaznov’s history as a deep-cover operator posing as a gourmet chef is strikingly similar to that of another Russian The Insider has profiled. Vitalii Kovalev, a military electronics engineer by training, was involved in research and development for a company owned by MiG, Russia’s military helicopter manufacturer, before suddenly dropping that career to train for two months as a chef in his native St. Petersburg, where he went on to work in local restaurants. Kovalev then obtained a special talent visa to relocate to the West – in his case, to the United States, a country he’d never have been allowed to visit without the express permission of the FSB, owing to his military security clearance. Kovalev worked in fancier kitchens in New York and Washington, D.C., and, like Griaznov, wasn’t shy of publicity under his cover identity, appearing on American morning show cooking segments. Then he got arrested.

In 2020, Kovalev took a high-speed drive for miles along a stretch of highway in Key West, Florida, evading police cruisers until spike strips blew out his tires and his Mustang veered off to the side of the road, its trunk filled with strange surveillance and signals equipment. Kovalev was later identified by the U.S. government as a GRU technical officer seconded to the FSB’s 16th Directorate, a cyber unit.

The FBI agent who investigated his case later developed symptoms consistent with Anomalous Health Incidents, otherwise known as Havana Syndrome, and was featured in the 60 Minutes segment that The Insider and Der Spiegel worked as investigative partners. Kovalev spent two years in prison, moved back to Russia, then was mobilized and sent to fight on the frontlines of Ukraine, where he died under mysterious circumstances.

As for Griaznov, “We think very strongly that he was going to organise operations of destabilisation, interference, spying,” French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said in a recent interview with BFM TV. “He’s now in the justice system which will be able to confirm the suspicions of the police.”

“I have at all times found myself to be a potential leader,” Griaznov stated in his resume, adding that he was “dependable, reliable, respectable, highly trusted and valued member of a team with abilities to accomplish the goals targeted.”

Now that he’s sitting in a jail cell in Paris, the result of incredibly reckless and vodka-fueled tradecraft, Griaznov’s superiors in Moscow Center might read that self-assessment very differently.

Additional reporting by Kato Kopaleishvili, Le Monde's Lucas Minisini, Charles-Henry Groult, and Thomas Eydoux, as well as Der Spiegel's Roman Lehberger and Fidelius Schmid.