Some 80 years after Ramon Mercader killed Leon Trotsky in Mexico City on orders from Josef Stalin, Vladimir Putin's regime plotted to send "a modern-day Mercader" to kill a Russian defector living in Florida, according to an upcoming book from Calder Walton, a Harvard scholar of national security and intelligence. Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West describes how Moscow tried to hunt down Aleksandr Poteyev, who provided information that broke up a ring of sleeper agents in the US in 2010, leading to a spy swap.
According to the book—and the New York Times, which says it confirmed Walton's work—Russian operatives pressured a Mexican scientist with a Russian wife to rent a condo near Miami Beach and gather information on Poteyev's vehicle in 2020. But the scientist, Hector Alejandro Cabrera Fuentes, wasn't much of a spy: He attracted the attention of security by trying to tailgate another vehicle through the entry gate of the complex where Poteyev was living. He was arrested two days later when he tried to fly to Mexico; US Customs and Border Protection agents found a photo of Poteyev's vehicle on his phone.
The Justice Department says Fuentes admitted he was acting on orders from Russia. Former intelligence officials tell the Times that Fuentes, apparently unaware of Poteyev's importance to Russia, was gathering information the Russians would have used to try to assassinate the former spy. The officials say the foiled plot led to tit-for-tat expulsions of Russian and American diplomats in 2021. Putin, a former KGB agent, has long been known to take a hard line against defectors, but the plot to kill one on US soil was seen as a dangerous escalation. "The red lines are long gone for Putin,” former CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos tells the Times. "He wants all these guys dead." (More Russia stories.)
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