Spy Story - You Are Being Watched

Beach front security cameras and street patrols

Brasil is currently unengulfed in a spy story that has all the ingredients of a blockbuster. Being a cold war baby, aged three at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, I grew up with Bond films, the novels of Le Carré, and ubiquitous Red paranoia. My obsession with the history of the Soviet Union that I visited over twenty times only heightened my fertile imagination about all things clandestine. I narrowly missed out on a career as a spy after I offended the royal family at a party in the British embassy in Moscow and confused the KGB recruiting honey in the Lenin library with my left libertarian monologue. Thus, the world lost a great potential double agent. Most spying narratives in Brasil concern internal repression and surveillance, a legacy of the Getulio Vargas regime in the 1930s and the 1960s military dictatorship. Threats to the state don’t lie abroad, they are home grown and normally involve communists and trade unionists, which brings me to Abin, the Agência Brasileira de Inteligência. Set up in 1999 to supply information about threats to state security, it’s former head, Alexandre Ramagem, a Bolsonaro ally, is currently under investigation by the Federal Police for the illegal use of First Mile Israeli spy software to infiltrate telephone networks and supply data to the former president about his political opponents.  PT, the Workers’ Party, are calling it one of the biggest scandals in history and claim that thousands of individuals and public officials were targeted including Ministers of the supreme court, Lula, and the assassinated militant Rio town councillor Marielle Franco. The Bolsonaro clan that is directly implicated in the affair have naturally enough denied all knowledge. But the revelations keep coming. This week footage has been released of a meeting called by the ex-president in 2022 of top military officials and sympathetic politicians in which Bolsonaro in an expletive laden rant clearly incites a coup de-état, insisting that ‘something be done before the election’. Federal Police have seized his passport. It is interesting to compare the situation in Brasil with what is happening in the United States where a proven racist, rapist, and liar is standing for President again. At the moment Bolsonaro is banned from standing for public office until 2030.