WASHINGTON — A world-renowned biologist from Mexico entered a guilty plea Tuesday to charges of spying while in the U.S., federal prosecutors announced.
U.S. officials said in a press release that 36-year-old Hector Alejandro Cabrera Fuentes, a Mexican national living in Singapore, was accused of renting an apartment in Miami under a false name and photographing the license plate number of a "specified U.S. person" who had given the U.S. information about Russia in the past.
Spanish-language newspaper El País identified the target as an FBI agent.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Fuentes had spent significant time in Russia. El País reported that the scientist was educated there, and had a second, Russian family who moved from Germany to Russia sometime before a Russian government official contacted him in 2019.
The newspaper cited an FBI report saying that Fuentes's second wife and two daughters had recently moved back to Russia to complete immigration paperwork, but were unable to leave.
The report El País cited claims the Russian official approached Fuentes in 2019 and offered to help ease their passage if he worked to pass along intelligence.
The official directed him to rent a specific property in the Miami area under a fake name, and not to tell his family in Mexico about the arrangement, according to the report.
U.S. prosecutors allege that in Feb. 2020, Fuentes went back to Moscow and was given the description of the FBI agent's car. Fuentes' Russian contact told him to find the car, take a photo of the license plate number, and note where it was parked.
Court documents show Fuentes traveled to Miami from Mexico City on Feb. 13 of that year. The next day, a security guard at the complex where the FBI agent lived noticed Fuentes and his wife enter the complex's parking lot by tailgating another car.
After watching Fuentes' wife take a photo of one of the cars in the parking lot, the security guard approached to question the pair. Prosecutors say Fuentes gave a name the guard didn't recognize, and the pair were told to leave.
Two days later, on Feb. 16, Fuentes and his wife were stopped from boarding their flight back to Mexico at Miami International Airport. U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents inspected Fuentes' wife's phone and found the photo of the FBI agent's license plate in her "recently deleted" folder, according to prosecutors.
After several hours of interrogation, Fuentes admitted to officials that he had been tasked with spying on the agent. His wife and daughter were allowed to fly back to Mexico while he was arrested, El País reported.
Fuentes pleaded guilty to a charge of acting within the United States on behalf of a foreign government without notifying the Attorney General.
The charge, a legal term for spying for a foreign government, faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison. His sentencing is scheduled for May 17.
It's a surprising twist in the story of the famed molecular biologist and heart specialist. Fuentes is well respected in the fields of biology and cardiovascular disease, and has contributed to dozens of scientific papers in his field.
In his home state of Oaxaca in Mexico, Fuentes is regarded as a local hero and role model, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The paper said many who know him were shocked when he was arrested and couldn't believe the charges against him.
“Dr. Héctor Cabrera is a distinguished citizen of our town and very beloved by all of the population,” Hazael Matus, the mayor of El Espinal, Cabrera’s hometown, told the Times. “He is a person who has always helped others.”
Despite the guilty plea, several details about Fuentes' mission for Russia remain unclear. Prosecutors have not named the official he spoke to, and did not specify whether he knew the target he was supposed to be tailing. U.S. officials also did not detail any specifics about what the Russian government wanted to do with the information they tasked Fuentes with gathering.
