A Mexican national pleaded not guilty to charges that he was working as a foreign agent for Russia.
Hector Fuentes, 35, was arrested in February in Miami after the FBI suspected him of working for an official with Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service.
Fuentes, who has not been charged with espionage, entered a not guilty plea Tuesday in federal court in Miami.
A Russian government official tasked Fuentes with tracking down a vehicle belonging to a U.S. government informant, according to the affidavit. The confidential human source whom Fuentes spied on worked for the FBI’s counterintelligence division, providing “information on Russian spying activities in South Florida.”
Fuentes and his wife drove to a condominium complex last month to take a photo of the vehicle’s license plate. A security guard approached their rental car after it tailgated its way into the condominium complex. Fuentes’s wife got out of the car and took a picture of the license plate of the source’s vehicle. When questioned by the security guard, Fuentes allegedly provided a fake name, and the guard told them to leave.
Two days later, Customs and Border Protection found the photo of the license plate on Fuentes’s wife’s phone when the couple was stopped at the Miami International Airport.
Fuentes admitted that he’d asked her to take the photo and that he had been “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 Justice Department said.
The Russian official recruited the Mexican national in 2019 and directed him to rent a specific apartment in the Miami area. Fuentes was told not to rent the apartment under his name and not to tell his family about it.
Fuentes made several trips to Moscow to meet with the Russian official.
“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 Justice Department 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.”
