The U.S. Felon Succeeding Putin’s Notorious ‘Chef’

A convicted felon who was locked up in a U.S. prison for money-laundering is pulling the strings behind a sweeping Kremlin influence operation with ties to Russian intelligence, The Daily Beast has learned.

Mira Terada—a 36-year-old Russian national who has also gone by the name Oksana Vovk—was arrested at Helsinki Airport in late 2018, two years after she was implicated in a cocaine-smuggling operation that spanned from Texas to Virginia.

She later pled guilty to money-laundering charges in connection to the drug scheme, and spent nearly 2.5 years in prison—an experience she later claimed had opened her eyes “to the brutality of the American judicial system, the inhumanity of American prisons and the complete indifference of the so-called liberal American society.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.