Russia uses Mexico as a hub for espionage on the US

Russian intelligence services are expanding their presence in Mexico for espionage operations targeting the United States, according to U.S. officials and former intelligence officers. It is a return to Cold War tactics by an increasingly aggressive regime.

Russia has added dozens of staff to its embassy in Mexico City in recent years, even though Moscow has limited trade ties with the country. U.S. officials say the trend is worrisome and believe the expanded buildup is intended to bolster the Kremlin’s intelligence operations targeting the U.S. and propaganda efforts aimed at undermining Washington and Ukraine.

The Biden administration has raised the issue with the Mexican government, a U.S. official told NBC News. “Russia has really invested in Mexico in terms of trying to expand their presence,” the official said.

The Mexican embassy and the Russian embassy did not respond to a request for comment.

CIA Director William Burns said earlier this month that his agency and the U.S. government are “deeply focused” on Russia’s growing presence in Mexico, which he said is partly a result of Russian spies being expelled from foreign capitals following Moscow’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“Part of this is a function of the fact that so many Russian intelligence officers have been expelled from Europe. … So they’re looking for places to go and places to operate,” Burns said in London this month when asked about suspected Russian espionage from Mexico. “But we’re very laser-focused on that.”

Russia’s actions in Mexico reflect a more aggressive posture by its intelligence services on multiple fronts as the Kremlin seeks to silence critics abroad, undermine support for Ukraine and weaken Western democracies, former intelligence officials said. That approach has included sabotage and attempted sabotage in Europe, assassinations, relentless cyberattacks and large-scale global disinformation campaigns, U.S. and European officials said.

“They’re willing to take much greater risks now than they might have taken right after the Cold War,” said Paul Kolbe, who spent 25 years as an operations officer at the CIA, with posts in Russia, the Balkans and elsewhere.

U.S. Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck, head of U.S. Northern Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2022 that Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency had a massive presence in Mexico.

“I want to point out that the majority of the GRU members in the world are in Mexico right now. They are Russian intelligence people, and they are very careful about their opportunities to influence American opportunities and access,” VanHerck said.

Since VanHerck’s comments, which came shortly after Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has further expanded its presence at the embassy in Mexico City and has received accreditation from Mexican authorities to do so.

Asked about the general’s comments at the time, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said he had no information about it and that Mexico is “a free, independent and sovereign country.”

Although Mexico has built extensive trade relations with the United States for decades, the country has always tried not to fully align itself with Washington’s foreign policy. It also maintains friendly relations with Russia and Cuba.

Trotsky and the Ice Axe

Russian spies – and their American informants – have a long history in Mexico.

In 1940, the Kremlin hunted down one of its revolutionary leaders and communist ideologists, Leon Trotsky, who had been ousted from power after disagreeing with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

Trotsky, once expected to succeed Vladimir Lenin as leader of the Soviet Union, lived in hiding, moving from country to country before settling in Mexico.

But on August 20, 1940, Trotsky admitted a Spanish communist he considered a friend into his private study. The visitor, Ramon Mercader, had hidden a shortened ice-climbing axe under his jacket, suspended by a string. He attacked Trotsky, who died of his wounds the next day.

John Sipher, who worked in the CIA’s intelligence service for 28 years, said Russia has always asked Americans who wanted to spy for Moscow to go to Mexico.

“For decades, when Americans reached out and volunteered to spy for Moscow, they were told to travel to Mexico City. The environment for Russian intelligence in the U.S. is difficult,” Sipher said.

In the 1970s, Christopher Boyce, a college student working at the TRW Aerospace Company in the affluent suburbs of Los Angeles, and his high school friend Andrew Daulton Lee were convicted of providing U.S. satellite secrets to the Soviets. For more than two years, Lee traveled to Mexico City to deliver secret information to agents at the Soviet embassy and to raise money for him and Boyce. Their case became the subject of a book and a major Hollywood film, “The Falcon and the Snowman.”

Harold “Jim” Nicholson, a senior CIA officer convicted in 1997 of passing secrets to Moscow, was serving a sentence for espionage when he tried to use his son to collect his “pension” payments from Russian agents in Mexico. His son was eventually arrested and convicted in 2010, and his father was convicted for a second time.

Two years ago, a prominent Mexican scientist, Hector Cabrera Fuentes, confessed that he had been co-opted by Russian agents to spy on a U.S. government informant living in Miami. Fuentes was leading a double life with two families on two continents, and Russian spies used that to coerce Fuentes into cooperating.

A ‘benign environment’

Unlike the U.S., where Russian intelligence is closely monitored by the FBI and consulates are closed, Mexico offers Moscow a lower-risk environment to monitor agents in the U.S. and conduct other operations, former intelligence officials said.

“It’s a very favorable environment for the Russians to operate in,” said Douglas London, a retired senior CIA operations officer and author of the memoir “The Recruiter.” “It makes perfect sense, and that’s why the Russians are there in such large numbers.”

The Russians would likely want to take advantage of Mexico’s proximity, but its relative safety beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement, to support both U.S. agents and Russian officers operating “in deep secrecy” inside the U.S., he said.

A U.S. agent working for Russian intelligence might travel back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border, meeting with Russian contacts to get paid, be debriefed, receive new supplies and receive training in communications methods or other espionage techniques, London and other former CIA officials said.

Russian intelligence could also take advantage of Mexico’s proximity to target Putin’s political enemies in the US, former intelligence officials said.

The Russians would likely have little interest in agents illegally crossing the southern border with migrants, London said. “They want every journey to be open, to look clean and to be unobtrusive,” he said.

But Russian intelligence services may have the ability to cooperate with cross-border criminal networks if it fits a specific mission and if they are willing to accept much higher risk, other former intelligence officials said.

Part of the GRU’s mandate is to prepare for possible sabotage operations in the event of a war with the United States. Mexico would be a practical base for such contingency plans, former intelligence officials said.

The perception of a large Russian espionage stronghold in Mexico is also useful as a propaganda tool, to exaggerate Moscow’s capabilities and fuel the perception of a supposedly “uncontrollable border,” Kolbe said.

U.S. officials are also concerned about Russia’s attempt to manipulate the information landscape in Mexico, not only to undermine international support for Ukraine but also to sow social division. Russia has expanded its state-funded media outlet RT in Mexico and has launched a major advertising campaign for the channel.

In April, the Russian ambassador to Mexico posted a false report from Russian state media claiming that the U.S. was recruiting drug cartel members from Mexico and Colombia and sending them to Ukraine to fight. The unsubstantiated story was picked up by several Mexican news organizations.