Secretary of the Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev met with top security officials from Bolivia, Brazil, and Cuba in Moscow on Monday. The meetings signal Russia’s interest in bolstering its anti-American partnerships in Latin America. A particular focus was likely on Russia’s effort to bolster its access to sanctioned Western goods. But a Russian readout outlined what Patrushev, an imperialist-minded hawk who despises the U.S., discussed with each particular official.
With Celso Amorim, top security adviser to Brazilian President Lula da Silva, it was “Russian-Brazilian cooperation in the field of security,” and “interaction between Russia and Brazil in multilateral formats.” This meeting reflects Lula’s ideological disdain for the U.S. and his tendency to view Russia as a key bulwark against American power. While Lula’s pro-Russian sympathies are no secret and extend to his support for Russia in regard to the war in Ukraine, he has avoided Western media scrutiny over these concerns and his continued corruption due to his conservation efforts in the Amazon rainforest. Of note, Lula last year moved the ABIN intelligence service out of the military command chain and under the control of the presidential administrative office. That may make it easier for Russia to foster new relationships with the ABIN.
With Bolivian national security adviser Jose Hugo Moldiz, “the situation in the Latin American region” was discussed. Whatever those discussions entailed, Bolivia is a major drug trafficking production and transit site and its government is riven by corruption.
Patrushev’s meeting with Cuban Internal Affairs Minister Lazaro Alberto Alvarez Casas is the most noteworthy. The two men discussed “issues of Russian-Cuban interaction between law enforcement and justice agencies.” Befitting the enduring Soviet Union turned Russian Federation relationship with Cuba’s communist dictatorship, Patrushev and Casas enjoy a close personal relationship. They meet in person at least once a year. And it’s no wonder why Patrushev holds his counterpart in, at least by Patrushev’s arrogant standards, unusually high esteem.
Consider, after all, that Cuba’s brutal but highly skilled DI intelligence service falls under Casas’s authority. The DI maintains extremely close relations with the big three Russian intelligence services: the FSB, GRU, and SVR. And whenever the Cubans and Russians are talking about “interaction between law enforcement and justice agencies” in Moscow (it’s harder for the U.S. to collect intelligence on meetings in Moscow than in Havana), their conversations are almost certain to focus on anti-American ambitions.
This is no peripheral concern.
The DI has a robust intelligence network on U.S. soil, particularly in Florida, and operates numerous espionage efforts on U.S. soil. These include election interference and the recruitment/handling of agents inside the U.S. government. For a country as small as Cuba, the DI has shown an impressive, sustained ability to recruit career U.S. officials in the State Department and intelligence community. But the DI is particularly valuable to Moscow in terms of its ability to facilitate Russian operations in the U.S. and share intelligence.
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Key concerns here include Russian efforts to find defectors living in the U.S. and conduct activities related to the so-called Havana Syndrome. As the Washington Examiner first reported in October 2021, there is circumstantial evidence to suggest that Patrushev leads Russia’s Havana Syndrome-related effort.
Put simply, these meetings show those Americans minded to believe Putin’s claim that he wants only a respectful U.S. partnership that he actually wants anything but that.
