Montes was arrested on September 21, 2001, and she subsequently was charged with conspiracy to commit espionage for the government of Cuba. Montes pleaded guilty to spying and, in October 2002, was sentenced to a 25-year prison term to be followed by five-years' probation.[2][3] She was released on January 6, 2023, after having served behind bars for 20 years.[4]
Montes's brother and sister, Tito and Lucy, became Federal Bureau of Investigation employees.[3] Tito was an FBI special agent,[3] and Lucy was a longtime FBI language analyst and translator.[3][1] Ana Montes's former boyfriend, Roger Corneretto, was an intelligence officer specializing in Cuba for the Pentagon.[3]
Ana Montes receiving a Certificate of Distinction from CIA director George Tenet, 1997
Montes joined the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in September 1985 after having worked for the United States Department of Justice. Her first assignment was at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, where she worked as an intelligence research specialist. In 1992, Montes was selected for the DIA's Exceptional Analyst Program, and she later traveled to Cuba to study the Cuban military.[3]
Montes advanced rapidly through the ranks at the DIA and became its most senior Cuban analyst.[6] Her co-workers regarded her as responsible and dependable, and they noted her "no-nonsense" attitude. Prosecutors later would allege that Montes already was working for the Cubans when she joined the DIA in 1985.[3]
Espionage
Montes was recruited by Cuban intelligence while she was a university student at Johns Hopkins University in the 1980s. She became known to other students for her strong opinions in support of left-wing Latin American movements like the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua. A Cuban agent eventually approached her. After recruiting her, the Cuban Intelligence Service groomed her to pursue employment with the Defense Intelligence Agency.[7][3]
In their charging documents, federal prosecutors stated:[3]
Montes communicated with the Cuban Intelligence Service through encrypted messages and received her instructions through shortwave encrypted transmissions from Cuba. In addition, Montes communicated by coded numeric pager messages with the Cuban Intelligence Service by public telephones located in the District of Columbia and Maryland. The codes included 'I received message' or 'danger.'
The prosecutors further stated that all of the information was on water-soluble paper that could be destroyed rapidly.
During the course of the investigation against her, it was determined that Montes passed a considerable amount of classified information to the Cuban Intelligence Directorate, including the identities of four U.S. spies in Cuba. In 2007, American DIA counterintelligence official Scott W. Carmichael publicly alleged that it was Ana Montes who told Cuban intelligence officers about a clandestine U.S. Army camp in El Salvador.[7][8] Carmichael alleged that Montes knew about the existence of the Special Forces camp because she visited it only a few weeks before the camp was attacked in 1987 by Cuban-supported guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN).[8]
Carmichael, who led the DIA investigation of Montes, named her as being directly responsible for the death of Green Beret Sergeant Gregory A. Fronius, who was killed at El Paraíso, El Salvador, on March 31, 1987, during the FMLN attack.[8] Carmichael characterized the damage that Montes caused to the DIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies as "exceptionally grave," and stated that she compromised a "special-access program" that was kept secret even from him, the lead investigator on her case.[7]
Encryption/decryption "cheat sheet" used by Montes
Carmichael further alleged that, unlike many in the U.S. intelligence community, he believed that Montes's penetration of the DIA was not the exception, but the rule, and that the Cuban intelligence services had multiple spies and moles within U.S. intelligence agencies.[8]
In 2004, a federal indictment alleged that Montes was assisted by another Cuban agent, Marta Rita Velázquez, who was a legal officer at the United States Agency for International Development and was further alleged to have recruited Montes into espionage. The federal indictment was unsealed in April 2013. Velázquez has been outside the United States since 2002, apparently in Sweden, which does not have an extradition treaty with the United States for spy cases.[9]
Arrest
Montes was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation at her office on September 21, 2001. Prosecutors stated that Montes was privy to classified information about the U.S. military's impending invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 and that they did not want her revealing this information to potential enemies.[3]
In 2002, Montes pleaded guilty to the charge that could have carried the death penalty but was sentenced to 25 years in prison in October of the same year after accepting a plea agreement with the U.S. government.[3] At the sentencing hearing, Montes described U.S. policy towards Cuba as cruel and unfair and said "I felt morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it".[10][11] After pleading guilty, Montes told CIA debriefers that she desired to protect Cuba from the United States and that she believed that "all the world is one country."[1] In a 2013 letter from prison to a friend, Montes wrote that "I believe that the morality of espionage is relative. The activity always betrays someone, and some observers will think that it is justified and others not, in every case."[1]
Montes is listed as FMC Register #25037-016. She was released on January 6, 2023.[12] Having been released, she will be monitored, including her internet usage, for five years. Montes will not be allowed to contact "foreign agents" or work for the U.S. government "without permission".[13]
She is currently living in Puerto Rico and continues to speak out against U.S. sanctions against Cuba.[14]
^ abcCarmichael, Scott (March 3, 2007). True Believer: Inside the Investigation and Capture of Ana Montes, Cuba's Master Spy. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press. ISBN978-1-59-114100-6.
