Putin wanted to have a Russian CIA informant killed on US soil in 2020

Shortly after taking office, long before the Ukraine war, President Joe Biden said in a television interview when asked whether he Wladimir Putin for a “killer”: “Mhm, yes.” It will soon be seen what price he has to pay for it. The remark in March 2021 led to diplomatic entanglements. Biden knew something at the time that the public didn’t know: the Russian president had previously crossed a line. His agents had tried to kill a Russian CIA informant on American soil a year earlier.

Target of Putin’s hit squad: Alexander Poteyev. After the turn of the millennium, the former Russian secret service officer was deputy head of the department for illegal agents at the foreign secret service SWR. By this time he had long been a double agent who also worked for the American foreign intelligence service CIA gave information. In 2010 he fled to the United States and started a new life in Miami.

In the same year, his information contributed to the unmasking and arrest of eleven SWR spies who lived on the American East Coast under false names, apparently pursuing normal jobs, but actually providing information for Moscow collect and recruit agents. At the time, President Barack Obama was still trying to improve relations with Moscow after the crisis that followed the war in Georgia. In order not to jeopardize the “reset”, i.e. the new start, there was an agent exchange: ten of the eleven arrested agents were deported to Russia. In return, Moscow released four prisoners.

Kremlin targets defectors

The New York Times has now reported that Poteyev was targeted by Putin, citing former government officials. The reason for the newspaper’s research was the upcoming publication of the book “Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West”, in which author Calder Walten reveals the case in detail. The Harvard historian, who interviewed Secret Service agents for his book, writes that the idea for the assassination came from the Kremlin. Moscow had already taken action against defectors on several occasions. At the headquarters of SWR biochemist Grigory Mairanovsky had developed a deadly toxin for such “operations”.

That’s how it was Sergei Skripal, a former colonel in the Russian military intelligence service GRU, target of a targeted assassination. Skripal was recruited by British intelligence agency MI6 in 1995. After his exposure, he was imprisoned in Russia. Skripal was later among the four prisoners who were released in the course of the agent exchange. He settled in Salisbury, England. In 2018 he was found unconscious there with his daughter Julija. Doctors diagnosed that both had been poisoned with a nerve agent from the Novichok group. Both survived. A serious diplomatic crisis ensued between London and Moscow.

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In Langley, Virginia, the headquarters of the CIA, they were now warned. Would Moscow also take action against defectors on American soil? Poteyev was sentenced in absentia in 2011 to decades in prison. Russian agents were tasked with tracking him down. That wasn’t particularly difficult: Like Skripal in Salisbury at the time, he lived under his real name in Miami, under which he acquired a fishing license and also registered as a Republican.

To shadow Poteyev, the Russians used a Mexican scientist named Hector Alejandro Cabrera Fuentes. He had studied microbiology in Kazan, Russia, and later received his doctorate from the University of Giessen. He had two wives: a Russian in Germany and one in Mexico. His Russian wife and their two children were not allowed to fly back to Germany after a trip to Russia in 2019. When Fuentes visited his family, he was told that he could be helped if he was willing to do something in return.

Putin’s revenge plan fails

Fuentes was hired to take an apartment north of Miami Beach. Later he was gradually familiarized with the details of the operation: in Moscow he received initial instructions on the surveillance mission. In February 2020, he received a description of Poteyev’s car. He was told he was not allowed to take any photos so as not to leave any traces behind.

But Fuentes screwed up the operation. He tried to drive into Poteyev’s gated community, following another car closely after the gate opened. Security personnel took notice. When he tried to fly to Mexico shortly thereafter, border officials searched him and found a photo of Poteyev’s vehicle. Fuentes was taken into custody. Then he unpacked. The Americans believed that Fuentes did not know what the purpose of the surveillance was, reports the New York Times.

Putin’s revenge plan failed. A month after biden After indirectly calling Putin a “killer”, Washington imposed sanctions on Moscow and expelled ten diplomats, including the head of the SWR Residentura. “We cannot allow a foreign power to interfere with our democracy with impunity,” Biden said, referring to Moscow’s attempts to help Donald Trump in the 2020 election campaign against Biden. The President did not mention Fuentes. Shortly thereafter, Putin expelled ten American diplomats, including the CIA’s “station chief”.