Raya Kiselnikova: the Russian spy who defected to the KGB after living an affair with a Mexican

Last Thursday, US General Glen VanHerck claimed that in Mexico, Russia has its largest spy base in the world. Following the assertions of the military officer of the neighboring country to the north, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), during the morning press conference this Friday, assured that Mexico did not is a colony of Russia, not China, or the United States.

These statements are made in the context of the confrontation between Russia and Ukraine. The United States has openly extended its support to the Ukrainians, something that Russia has not liked so much.

However, this is not the first time that Mexico has been linked to Russian spies, as there are records that in the past there were also similar cases. Such is the case of Raya Kiselnikova, a woman who appears on the list of defectors of the KGB, the former Soviet intelligence and espionage agency.

She defected while in Mexico in 1970. The reasons were that I had met a man in Mexico, and did not want to return to his country. However, the circumstances that led her to make the decision turned into an intricate spy affair, which ended up triggering a diplomatic crisis between the Mexican and Soviet governments, and which had as a background the intervention of the Central American Intelligence Agency (CIA).

And it is that throughout the Cold War, Mexico was a strategic north of espionage in the region. In the Mexican capital, the CIA had one of its most important offices in the world, while the Soviets made their embassy in the country, the most important spy center in Latin America.

Being accredited as personnel of the USSR embassy in Mexico, Soviet KGB spies enjoyed diplomatic immunity from operating with some slack. On the instruction of the Soviet government, Raya Kiselnikova moved to Mexico as a translator assigned to the embassy's commercial office, on July 4, 1968. His arrival in the country coincided with the beginning of the student movement and a strong anti-communist campaign, orchestrated by the government of then-President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz.

The Russian woman was 32 years old when she arrived in the Mexican capital, was the widow of a Soviet nuclear scientist, spoke four languages very fluently and was an excellent secretary. As a security measure and as was the case with all its employees, the embassy withdrew his passport from Raya, as well as his personal documents at the time of completing his immigration process in Mexico.

She, like the rest of the Soviet employees at the Mexican embassy, was prohibited from interacting with people of other nationalities. However, she disobeyed, and on one of her lonely visits to museums, she met a young Mexican of Spanish origin named Francisco Lurueña, who invited her for a weekend to Cuernavaca, in the state of Morelos.

On December 13, 1969, Raya agreed and failed to sleep at the embassy. On the Sunday she returned, she was interrogated to testify who she had spent the night with. The young woman refused to answer questions from Oleg Netchiporenko, the second consular secretary, whom the Federal Directorate of Security, the Mexican political police, identified as an undercover intelligence agent. He was actually responsible for the counterintelligence of the rezidentura, as the KGB stations abroad were called.

To Nechiporenko's insistent questions, the young translator responded with the same refusal: “I can't say it.”

Later, they tried to set a trap for Raya to return to Moscow, however, a telegram she managed to read alerted her to the trap, so she asked Lurueña to help her escape from her apartment, located very close to the Russian embassy.

One night, Raya was able to outwit the guards who were watching her and flee to the Ministry of the Interior, where she asked for asylum. Hours later, Nechiporenko arrived denouncing Raya's abduction. When he arrived, he found her surrounded by Mexican agents. In an interview published in the newspaper Excélsior in 2007, Nechiporenko recalled: “I started talking to her. I was crying. I told him I had nothing to fear, that everything was going to work out. I think he was convincing her when our ambassador was reckless: he called all the embassy staff to report to the Governorate. When she saw the driver of a military intelligence officer arrive, a fearsome man, she was frightened. At that time, DFS agents told me that the time for the interview was over.”

According to the Mexican archives, a Population official confronted Raya and Nechiporenko and finally granted her the protection of the Mexican government. On March 4, 1970, Raya Kiselnikova appeared before the media, at the Vista Hermosa Hotel. At her press conference, she assured that she could no longer bear to live under the Soviet regime and denounced that Oleg Nechiporenko kept her under constant surveillance.

Kiselnikova later became an informant for the US agency on the activities of the KGB in Mexico. In exchange, they transferred her to Acapulco, got her a job as a secretary in a luxurious hotel and managed to get the KGB to lose track of her. This had consequences for diplomacy between the Soviet Union and Mexico.

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