Ana Montesa former analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the arm of espionage of the United States Army, was released Friday from a federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, after more than 20 years behind bars for spying for the government of Cuba.
Montes spied for Cuba for 17 years, revealing the identities of America’s undercover intelligence officers and their highly sensitive intelligence gathering capabilities, until his arrest in 2001.
During the day, she was the top Cuba analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency. At night, she would type pages and pages of government secrets that she had memorized and pass them on to Cuban intelligence.
According to the Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI), Montes was known throughout the US intelligence community for her expertise. No one knew what kind of espionage expert she had become and how much she was leaking classified US military information and deliberately distorting the government’s views on Cuba. And she had passed a polygraph or lie detector.
Michelle Van Cleave, who was the head of US counterintelligence under President George W. Bush, told Congress in 2012 that Montes was “one of the most damaging spies the United States has ever encountered.”
“She compromised everything, practically everything, that we knew about Cuba and how we operate in Cuba and against Cuba,” Van Cleave said. “So the Cubans were very aware of everything we knew about them and they could use that to their advantage. In addition, she was able to influence the estimates on Cuba in her conversations with her colleagues and also found the opportunity to provide information that she acquired to other powers ”.
The espionage carried out by Montes took place almost at the same time when Robert Hansen and Aldrich Ames they spied for the Soviet intelligence services while working for the FBI and CIA, respectively. And both are serving life in prison for their crimes.
But the case of Montes was something different. Hanssen and Ames took large sums of espionage money and physically removed classified materials from their agencies. Montes never spied for money and never removed materials, just memorized and transcribed them when he was at home.according to the FBI.
Montes was motivated by ideology. His decision to spy was based in part on his hostility toward President Ronald Reagan’s Latin American policies, especially US support for the Nicaraguan Contras, according to a heavily redacted report by the Defense Department’s inspector general.
Montes was recruited by Cuban intelligence in 1984when a fellow student from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies approached her after she expressed outrage over US actions in Nicaragua.
The student was an access agent—someone who recruits spies—and introduced him to a Cuban intelligence officer under the pretense that they needed Spanish-language news articles on Nicaragua translated into English. At dinner in New York City, Montes “agreed without hesitation to work through the Cubans to ‘help’ Nicaragua,” according to the inspector general’s report.
As Montes rose through the career ladder and received a number of accolades for her work, the FBI received a tip from a government employee that she appeared to be spying for the Cubans, prompting the agency to begin investigating Montes. according to the FBI.
She was arrested days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.according to an FBI statement about his arrest, when the Defense Intelligence Agency shifted its focus to Afghanistan and the director did not want to risk Montes passing on Pentagon war plans.
Pete Lapp, one of the FBI agents who investigated and arrested Montes, said she was stoic during her arrest. “I think she had planned that day, if it happened, for 17 years,” Lapp told CBS News.
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