Governor Alberto Puente.
Alberto Puente was Governor of California in the 1890s. Although Puente was supposedly loyal to Mexican Chief of State Benito Hermión, he was actually in the pay of Kramer Associates President Diego Cortez y Catalán, with whom he fomented the Great Northern War.
On 7 November 1897, Cortez sent his private secretary, Russell Smith, to meet with Puente, to formulate a plan to provoke a war between the United States of Mexico and the Russian Empire. Over the next week, the two men worked out a plan to bribe a Russian army officer to briefly send troops over the border into California. Cortez would then make use of an agent within the Mexican State Department to increase tensions between the two nations, after which Puente would provoke a Russian invasion of California, then appeal to Chief of State Benito Hermión for military assistance against the Russians.
Cortez and Puente put their plan into operation the following spring, with Puente sending word to Hermión on 17 February 1898 of "repeated violations of the border by the Russian Imperial forces." Tensions between Mexico and Russia mounted throughout March and April 1898 as one of Cortez's agents within the State Department mistranslated a series of messages with the Russian Foreign Ministry. In late May, a force from California attacked the Russians, who responded by sending a regiment marching toward San Francisco on 21 May.
Under orders from Puente, the California Guard fell back until reaching a point twenty miles north of San Francisco, at which point Puente called upon Hermión for "immediate and large-scale help." Over the course of the summer, a combined force of the California Guard and Mexican marines invaded Alaska and defeated the Russian forces there. Engineering teams from K.A. accompanied the marines north into Alaska, and set up camps in the Yukon to prepare to open gold mines the following spring.
Sobel's sources for Alberto Puente's role in starting the Great Northern War are Andrew Stirling's The Secret History of the Great Northern War (London, 1923); and Carl Needham's The Great Northern War (New York, 1963).