In many ways, I imagine that Brazil is the preeminent national power in occult intelligence in the Caribbean and Latin America. This is largely because Brazil is the most populous and wealthy nation anywhere nearby that has any kind of even quasi-coherent policy in occult matters.
While the United States is
much more powerful on the global stage, the fact that there is no coordinated response to the supernatural in the US, and most decisions about intelligence matters there are made by people who have not the slightest idea about the existence of anything paranormal, means that the US intelligence community is not terribly significant in occult circles in the Caribbean and Latin America.
Individual DEA agents or CIA case officers who have discovered the existence of the supernatural might be locally important, but given that most of them can't call on national resources while their bosses don't believe in magic, their influence is rarely far-reaching.
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Originally Posted by D10
Well, the usual favorites all have some reason or another to be around the settings location. FSB, MI6 and CIA all have local havens and local interests
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Well, can you elaborate on that?
British intelligence has an obvious stake in the Caribbean, given that there are UK possessions, Commonwealth countries and traditional allies there. On the other hand, the UK is no longer a great power and from a realism point of view, when the Falkland War started, the state of UK intelligence in that part of the world was so poor that there weren't even any good maps of the important areas anywhere in Whitehall.
Military planners had to start with buying civilian maps of the Falklands and areas where various Argentine bases were. And then ask the Americans to route satellites there.
The US
is a superpower, rich and powerful enough so that even parts of the globe that barely register as existing to the average voter might still receive more US intelligence resources than any other nation can bring to bear. That being said, the CIA is still not a very large organization and realistically cannot cover much of the world with actual case officers and agents. The world, after all, is very big.
Facebook and Google both have much higher operations budgets than the CIA and no one would expect employees of these companies to actually spend significant time in all of the countries where they provide services. CIA only employs about 1% of the numbers of personnel Walmart does and while ca 20,000-30,000 people sounds like a lot, the vast majority of them work in office buildings around Washington D.C. and much of the rest work in embassies.
About 5,000 people work for the NCS, that part of the CIA which actually does anything close to espionage, up from the 2,500 personnel in the this department in 2001. Again, most of these people still work in offices in DC and embassies, as espionage involves a lot more paperwork and reading open sources than movies would have you believe, but let's ignore that. Let's focus on the fact that most of the 2,500 officers added to the NCS after 9/11 were added to combat terrorism and Islamic extremism. And the fact that very many of the jobs before 9/11 were focused on the old enemy of the Cold War and that China, Russia and Eastern Europe received and still received a significant focus.
I'm prepared to believe that a few hundred CIA officers are concerned with Latin America, but how many officers are actually assigned to anything to do with the Caribbean, aside maybe for an aging Cuba desk and an overworked Venezuelan* one?
One or two people in every embassy in the Caribbean, sure, but actual covert operations anywhere nearby?
I imagine that the DEA, for example, has a lot more personnel and resources devoted to Latin America and the Caribbean than the CIA. Even the FBI, through legal attachés, law enforcement cooperation, organized crime and forensic accounting investigations and its counterterrorism brief probably has a more significant intelligence presence in the Caribbean and Latin America than the CIA. Frankly, in the real world, not much that happens in that part of the world is a matter of national security for the US. It is primarily significant to law enforcement, counter-drug and organized crime investigations.
As for the FSB, I know that Russia
wants to be viewed as a Great Power, but in actual fact, they control similar resources as Mexico and Sweden (and less than Brazil). Sure, Russia probably spends disproportinate amounts of their limited resources on their military and intelligence services, but is that really enough to have any significant presence this far away from their regional intelligence and security concerns?
I don't expect Sweden to have covert operatives or networks of agents in Italy or Greece, let alone Jamaica or Venezuela. And I don't expect that Mexico has any significant intelligence assets in Bulgaria, Moldova or Serbia, at least outside of their embassies, if any.
Does Russia really have any significant intelligence assets in the Caribbean any longer?
*That most people in authority don't really listen to, because, honestly, how much do you need to know about an ongoing dumpster fire when you clearly don't have any means to put it out?