| Ana Belen Montes | |
|---|---|
| Allegiance | Republic of Cuba |
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| Nationality | United States of America |
| Occupation | Intelligence Analyst |
Ana Belen Montes (Born February 28, 1957) is a former senior analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the United States. On September 21, 2001, she was arrested and subsequently charged with Conspiracy to Commit Espionage for the government of Cuba. Montes eventually pleaded guilty to spying, and in October, 2002, she was sentenced to a 25-year prison term followed by 5 years of probation.[1]
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Montes was born in West Germany, where her father, Alberto Montes, was posted as an Army doctor. The family later lived in Topeka, Kansas and later Towson, Maryland, where she graduated from Loch Raven High School in 1975. In 1979 she earned a degree in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia, and in 1988 she finished a master's degree at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. It was later revealed that her father, a Puerto Rican, had strong conservative views, and had a strained relationship with his more radical daughter.
Montes joined the DIA from the U.S. Department of Justice in September 1985. 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 later traveled to Cuba to study the Cuban military. Prosecutors would later allege that Montes was already working for the Cubans when she joined the DIA in 1985.
Montes was DIA's most Senior Cuban analyst. She advanced rapidly through the ranks once at DIA and her co-workers regarded her as responsible and dependable, and noted her "no-nonsense" attitude.
In their charging documents, federal prosecutors stated:
"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 rapidly destroyed.
During the course of the investigation against her, it was determined that Montes passed a considerable amount of classified information to Cuba's government, including the identities of four spies, and information which caused the death of a U.S. special operations soldier in Central America.[2]
Montes was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation at her office on 20 September 2001. Prosecutors stated that Montes had been 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.
In 2002, Montes pleaded guilty to the charge which 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. According to her lawyer, Plato Cacheris, Montes committed the espionage based upon moral reasons, as "She felt the Cubans were treated unfairly by the U.S. government."
Montes is currently incarcerated at FMC Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas. FMC Carswell is listed by the Federal Bureau of Prisons as a facility located in the northeast corner of the Naval Air Station, Joint Reserve Base, Fort Worth, which provides specialized medical and mental health services to female offenders.
Montes is listed as FMC Register #25037-016. Her tentative release date is listed as July 1, 2023. There is at present no parole in the US federal prison system.
In 2007, DIA counterintelligence official Scott W. Carmichael alleged that it was Ana Montes who told Cuban intelligence officers about a clandestine U.S. Army camp in El Salvador. Carmichael alleged that Montes knew about the existence of the Special Forces camp because she visited it in only a few short weeks before the camp was attacked in 1987 by Cuban-supported guerrillas of the FMLN.
Carmichael, who led DIA's investigation of Montes, named Montes as being directly responsible for the death of Green Beret SGT Gregory A. Fronius who was killed at El Paraiso, El Salvador, on March 31, 1987 during the FMLN attack. Carmichael characterized the damage 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 even from him, the lead investigator on her case.
Carmichael further alleged that many in the U.S. intelligence community believed that Montes' penetration of the DIA was not the exception, but the rule, and that the Cuban intelligence service had numerous spies and moles within U.S. intelligence agencies.[2]
In a May 6, 2002 interview with CBS News, former Undersecretary of State John Bolton stated that an official 1998 U.S. government report with significant contributions by Montes concluded that Cuba did not represent a significant military threat to the United States or the region. Bolton alleged that because of Montes' espionage, it was not possible to exclude the possibility that the administration of President Bill Clinton may have overlooked Cuba as a potential threat because of Montes' influence and the way she shaped her reporting at DIA.