“The Queen of Cuba” was the expression used by members of the US intelligence community to refer to Ana Montes. In practice, the same nickname could have been awarded to him by the secret services in Havana.
Montes became the main analyst dedicated to political and military issues on the island within the United States Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), where she developed a successful career between 1985 and 2001.
During that time, Montes got several promotions, as well as 10 special recognitions for his work, including a National Intelligence Certificate of Distinction -the third most important award in this field- which was presented to him in 1997 by the then CIA director George Tenet.
Where they should really be grateful for Montes’s invaluable services, however, was in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, for which she worked as a spy throughout her years in the employ of the DIA, giving Havana access to highly classified information.
“The first day she entered the Defense Intelligence Agency, Montes was already a full-time recruited agent for the Cuban Intelligence Service. Every day that she went to work, her goal was to memorize the three most important things that she thought Cubans needed to know to protect themselves from the United States,” Peter Lapp, one of the two FBI agents in charge of the investigation against the United States, told BBC Mundo. Montes, which in 2001 led to his capture and subsequent sentence to 25 years in prison for espionage.
“She is among the top spies the US government has arrested since World War II. and it is one of those that has caused the most damage in the modern history of this country,” adds Lapp, who was also in charge of interviewing Montes during the seven months that followed his arrest to learn more about the scope of his work to Havana.
As a result of that experience and with subsequent research, Lapp wrote the book “The Queen of Cuba”, whose publication is scheduled for October of this year.
Montes was released on January 7, after 20 years in custody. However, the 65-year-old woman will remain under supervision for five years and her Internet use will be monitored. She is also prohibited from working for the government or contacting foreign agents without permission.
But who is Ana Montes and how did she manage to spy on the United States government for so many years without being discovered?
From exemplary student to spy
The daughter of Puerto Rican parents, Ana was born in 1957 on a US military base in Germany, where her father worked as a doctor. The family then moved to Kansas, Iowa, and eventually Maryland, where Ana finished high school with straight A’s.
While he was pursuing a degree in International Relations at the University of Virginia, he made a study trip to Spain in 1977 where he met an Argentine leftist student, who supposedly “opened his eyes” to the support given by the United States government to authoritarian regimes at that time, according to what Ana Colón, a former classmate, told in 2013, to The Washington Post.
“After each protest, Ana used to explain to me the ‘atrocities’ that the US government committed against other countries.”Recounted Columbus.
After obtaining his bachelor’s degree, Montes moved to Puerto Rico where he was unable to find work, so shortly after he ended up accepting a job offer at the Department of Justice in Washington DC.
While working there, she decided to study a master’s degree at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, where Cuban espionage discovered her potential and decided to recruit her.
“She was discovered and evaluated by a classmate named Marta Rita Velázquez, also Puerto Rican. Ana openly expressed her anger and dissatisfaction with US policy in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Marta became friends with her and thus also learned that she worked in the Department of Justice and that she had access to classified information. So, a couple of months later, she introduced him to a diplomat who worked in the Cuban mission at the UN, ”says Lapp.
This is how Montes ended up being recruited as a Cuban spy.
money and ideology
Montes agreed to work for the Cubans although, he told investigators, he had never thought of that possibility before.
And even though it was risky, full-time work, he didn’t get paid for it.
“She did not receive any payment, which makes people think that she was a spy for ideological reasons.. In fact, she told us that she would have been offended if the Cubans had given her money to spy on,” Lapp says.
In fact, once discovered and detained, Montes assured that he had acted motivated by the need for justice, trying to help Cubans protect themselves from US policies.
“I believe that our government’s policy towards Cuba is cruel, unfair and profoundly unfriendly. And I felt morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system,” Montes said when he was brought to court in October 2002.
A CIA report, cited by The Washington Postconsiders that the Cuban agents manipulated her by appealing to her narcissism and making her believe that Havana urgently needed her help.
“Her handlers, with her involuntary help, assessed her vulnerabilities and exploited her psychological needs, ideology, and personality pathology to recruit her and keep her motivated to work for Havana,” the CIA said.
Unlike others, Lapp does not believe that Montes acted motivated both by a left-wing ideology and by a deep rejection of his own country.
“I think she was more anti-American, that she was very upset with what the US government was doing at the time in El Salvador and Nicaragua; and in her policy towards Cuba. I disagree with those who say that she was an ideologically motivated spy. ANDshe was idealistic, but that she was more anti-American than pro-Cuban”, it states.
“She was very angry with Ronald Reagan and what we were doing. And she really hated our country. Even today I think she still hates our country. Technically she is an American, but she considers herself a citizen of the world, she is more of an anti-American than someone who believes in the Cuban system, in socialism and Marxism,” she adds.
Succeed in Washington and Havana
In 1985, Montes undercover made the first of several trips to Havana. He would later carry out others, some of which would be paid for by the US government itself, during which his daytime meetings with US Interests Section officials on the island would be followed by nightly meetings with his Cuban bosses.
It was the Cubans who apparently encouraged her to apply to work at the DIA and who would benefit most from her rising career as an analyst in which she would end up presenting her reports to members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council of the United States. . And indeed, shortly before her arrest, was about to be promoted to a position in the National Intelligence Council, a body that advises the director of the CIA.
Lapp points out that Montes was a very good analyst, which in practice ended up favoring her career in Washington and her contributions to Havana.
“If she had simply sat at her desk and let the hours pass, she would not have become the ‘queen of Cuba.’ She was a very good analyst and the better she did her job, the more doors opened for her and the more access she got. So if she was competent at her day job, the more information she could get for her night job,” she notes.
classic espionage
To avoid being discovered, Montes used one of the safest spy tools: her own memory. For hours he would sit at his desk to read and memorize the classified information that he considered of interest to Havana., which he later transcribed at night on a Toshiba laptop at his home and which, finally, he copied onto floppy disks that he gave to his Cuban contacts. That way, he never had to take any documents from the office.
Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays Montes used a short wave radio to listen to one of the so-called “number stations”, a radio station in which at 9 and 10 pm a voice would say things like: “Attention, attention . Three, One, Four, Five…”. These numbers had to be deciphered through a code sheet that the Cubans had given him and that was made on a paper that was soluble in water, with which -in an emergency- it was enough to throw it down a toilet to make it disappear like evidence.
This was how she received her instructions.
However, when delivering the information collected, she used to go to lunch with her current Cuban contact in broad daylight.
“She would just go to lunch with them and hand them the floppy drive. As simple as that. No secret hiding places, no brush passes [breves contactos físicos para intercambiar objetos]nor any sophisticated espionage technique, they were just a Hispanic man and woman having a long lunch at a Chinese restaurant one Sunday afternoonLapp says.
For urgent cases, Montes could place calls from public phone booths to pager or pager numbers of his Cuban contacts. He had a code to notify him that he was in danger and another to notify him that he needed to see them.
compromised intelligence
In Lapp’s opinion, Montes’ espionage activities caused great damage to US intelligence.
“Each of the individuals that she knew and who worked for the United States government, regardless of whether they did so openly or covertly, were identified by her before Havana, with which the Cubans knew everyone who was working. on the island for the US government,” he says.
“She compromised large amounts of classified information that we found on her computer. Too identified four United States intelligence agents who went to work in Cuba covertly as part of other agencies and under other names“he adds.
However, Lapp considers that probably the greatest damage it caused was transferring to Cuba information about a highly sensitive satellite program that belonged to the National Recognition Office and that was so secret that it could not be incorporated into the indictment against Montes in court to prevent it from being publicly known.
The former FBI agent also believes it possible that Montes could have played a role in the murder of a Green Beret (a US Armed Forces Special Forces agent) that occurred in El Salvador.
“We can’t prove it, but I firmly believe that she probably informed the Cubans about who he was, where he was. What was he doing and what was his mission? I know what she told us about this hypothesis and she didn’t really care if he died as a result of it or not,” Lapp notes.
“I can’t prove it, but I think she has blood on her hands,” he adds.
Another controversial episode in which Montes participated occurred when Cuban warplanes shot down in February 1996 two planes belonging to the organization Hermanos al Rescate -which was dedicated to helping Cubans escaping on rafts from the island- causing the death of four people. .
At that time, Montes was participating in the US government’s response team to that crisis and, at the same time, was very active in collaborating with the Cuban government.
“The next night, after returning from the Pentagon, she met with the Cubans and told them how we were reacting. And she met them every night, after they had killed four US citizens. So, I’m not saying that she pulled the trigger and four Americans died, but she sat down with the people who did it — with the government and intelligence services that helped make it happen — and cooperated with them by letting them know how America I was going to react. That’s horrendous,” says Lapp.
Paradoxically, shortly before she was arrested, Montes was on the way to putting herself in a position where she could have done a lot of damage to the United States, since she was going to have access to the US military plans for the war in Afghanistan. Something that, according to the analysts, would have provided the Cuban government with very valuable information that it could have provided to the Taliban or the Afghan government.
What prevented this from happening was that at that time the investigations against Montes had already been going on for 11 months and, after the attacks of September 11, it was decided to speed up his arrest to avoid greater risks.
Once detained, on September 21, 2001, Montes negotiated an agreement with the US authorities in which she would cooperate fully with the investigators on the condition that she not receive a sentence of more than 25 years in prison.
This full collaboration resulted in interrogations to which Montes submitted two or three times a week for seven months to provide the FBI with all the details that were requested.
Lapp believes that may have played a role in the fact that Havana has apparently not shown much interest in her or her release.
“I speculate that they are not very enthusiastic about her pleading guilty to the US government and then sitting down for full cross-examination. I have the feeling that she did a lot of damage to the Cubans when she spoke. I wonder if the Cubans are a little angry with her, ”she points out.
If so, Ana Montes would no longer be considered “the queen of Cuba,” neither in Washington nor in Havana.
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