A Mexican citizen living in Singapore was arrested in Miami this week on charges of working as a foreign agent for Russia and for tailing a U.S. government source.
Hector Alejandro Cabrera Fuentes was arrested by the FBI on Monday after being stopped at Miami International Airport on Sunday evening on his way to Mexico City. In a still-sealed complaint, he was charged by the Justice Department with “acting within the United States on behalf of a foreign government (Russia), without notifying the Attorney General, and conspiracy to do the same.”
Fuentes was recruited by the Russians in 2019, according to reports.
The Miami Herald, which viewed the criminal affidavit, reported that Fuentes was accused of working for an official with Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service. The confidential human source whom Fuentes spied on worked for the FBI’s counterintelligence division, providing “information on Russian spying activities in South Florida.”
The Miami Herald said Fuentes had two wives, one in Mexico and one in Russia, and that Fuentes said his Russian handler promised to help get his Russian wife and her two daughters out of Russia.
“We can help each other,” the Russian reportedly told Fuentes.
Last Thursday, Fuentes, who has a business and tourism visa, arrived in Miami from Mexico City with his Mexican wife. On Friday, a security guard at the apartment building where the FBI source lived approached Fuentes’s rental car after it tailgated its way into the condominium complex. Fuentes’s wife hopped out of the car and took a picture of the license plate of the source’s vehicle. When questioned by the guard about their actions, Fuentes allegedly provided a fake name, and the guard told them to leave.
When the duo was stopped at the airport on their way out of the country two days later, U.S. Customs and Border Protection looked at the phone of Fuentes’s wife and discovered a close-up image of the source’s license plate in her phone’s folder of recently deleted images, and Fuentes admitted to authorities that he’d asked her to take the picture. A review of Fuentes’s phone showed his wife sent him the picture via WhatsApp, and Fuentes told investigators that “he was directed by a Russian government official to conduct this operation.”
“Messages on Fuentes’s phone showed that the Russian official initiated and directed the meetings,” the DOJ said.
The Russian official reportedly recruited Fuentes last year and directed him to rent a specific apartment in Miami-Dade County, instructing him not to do so in his own name and not to tell his family about their discussions. According to documents, Fuentes traveled to Moscow last year to confirm he’d made the arrangements, and the Russian approved and told Fuentes to see him again the next time he was in Russia. Fuentes traveled to Moscow again in February.
“At this meeting, the Russian government official provided Fuentes with a physical description of a U.S. government source’s vehicle and told Fuentes to locate the car, obtain the source’s vehicle license plate number, and note the physical location of the source’s vehicle,” the DOJ said. “The Russian official instructed Fuentes to meet the Russian official again in April or May 2020, to inform him of the results of the search for the source’s vehicle.”
It is not known how the Russian intelligence agent knew about the confidential human source, and further details about the purpose of the surveillance and the broader plot were not revealed by the DOJ.
During a brief magistrate hearing on Tuesday, Fuentes revealed he “had bank accounts and jobs in different parts of the world” and “was making $7,500 a month as a researcher at the National University of Singapore and another $5,000 a month from a part-time job with an Israeli company in Germany, along with holding about $100,000 in bank accounts in Mexico, Singapore, and the United States,” according to the Miami Herald.
Fuentes said he couldn’t access the money, though, so the magistrate assigned him a temporary public defender. He’s being held as a flight risk.
A pretrial detention hearing is set for Friday in Miami, and Fuentes will be arraigned March 3.
FBI Director Christopher Wray warned about Russian espionage efforts while testifying before Congress earlier this month.
This isn’t the first time a Russia-connected source made headlines. One day after President Trump gave Attorney General William Barr “full and complete” declassification authority to investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation in May 2019, the New York Times published a piece about a source “long-nurtured by the CIA.”
Reports by CNN and others in September 2019 about the alleged source’s 2017 exfiltration from Russia eventually exposed his identity and revealed he was living in the Washington area. He since has been moved.
