Ana Montes after her release from prison
Ana Belén Montes appeared demure as she posed for a photo shortly after her release from 20 years in prison. Now almost 66 years old, her brown hair is streaked with gray.
There was little to suggest that Montes had spent years as a deep-rooted Cuban secret agent in the United States government. Or that she was once considered by America to be one of the most dangerous intelligence agents targeting the nation.
And that, experts say, is exactly what made her the perfect spy.
Needle in a haystack
Ana Montes was arrested on September 21, 2001 and ultimately convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage against the United States. This may interest you : The 10 longest running video game franchises, ranked.
By then, US intelligence officials had been searching for a Cuban mole in government for nearly a decade, but finding out who was passing classified information to the Cubans proved to be a monumental task.
“It really is a needle in a haystack,” said Pete Lapp, a retired FBI agent who, along with his partner, Steve McCoy, was part of the team that helped prove Montes was a Cuban spy.
Lapp and his team were tasked with flushing out the mole. To complicate matters, Mr Lapp said the Cubans also worked to mask Montes’ gender by suggesting the spy was a man with high-level clearance, which expanded the list of potential targets.
“It would have been a much easier task if we knew we were looking for a woman,” he said.
It turned out that the FBI was not just looking for a woman, but a senior US intelligence official on Cuba and Central America.
The Queen of Cuba
With Montes, Cuba played a long game. She was tapped to spy on behalf of their government even before she finished graduate school and as a result, Mr. This may interest you : Women wonder about rocket science. Lapp said, she joined the United States Defense Intelligence Agency as a “fully recruited agent of the service of Cuban intelligence”.
“She did a good job being almost perfect, everything she did as an analyst only built a wall of security around her,” he said.
Ana Montes rose through the ranks of US intelligence, first on a portfolio for El Salvador and Nicaragua, before becoming a high-level intelligence officer studying Cuba. Within the agencies, her expertise has earned her the nickname of The Queen of Cuba.
But for nearly 17 years, she also passed some of the country’s top secret information to a hostile foreign government.
Ana Montes after her arrest in 2001
“One of the reasons I think she never got caught is that she largely memorized the information she took away,” said Jim Popkin, whose book, Code Name Blue Wren, traces Montes’ rise through the ranks and his ultimate capture.
“She had her day job where she would sit quietly, studiously and memorize as much of these classified documents as she could. And then her night job was to go home, type it on a Toshiba laptop, encrypt and pass it to the manager.”
Instead of working for money, Montes would later tell officials that she was spying on the United States because she disagreed with her government’s interventionist policies in Central America and Cuba.
“She was particularly dangerous because she provided the true identities of US agents working in Cuba,” Mr. Popkin said.
That information alone could have endangered lives, but Montes also revealed the existence of a multi-billion dollar stealth satellite that the US was using to spy on Russia, China and Iran.
“That’s why intelligence officials call her one of the most damaging spies in American history, and I argue, the most damaging spy we’ve ever had,” Mr. Popkin said.
A web of deception
In 2000, intelligence officials suspected Montes of being the possible spy, and Mr. On the same subject : The Santa Barbara Mental Wellness Center hosts the 26th Annual Mental Health Arts Festival. Lapp and his team zeroed in on her as a suspect.
“I was adamant, let’s not focus on catching him in the act of spying. Let’s make sure we have the right person first,” Mr Lapp said.
After years of searching for the mole, a breakthrough came on Memorial Day weekend in 2001, when Lapp and his team searched Montes’ home and discovered more than a decade of classified information on a laptop under his bed.
“I thought, holy [expletive],” said Mr. Lapp, who will detail his investigation in an upcoming book, Queen of Cuba.
Image source, US Department of Defense
Montes receives a National Intelligence Certificate of Distinction from the CIA’s George Tenet
For Montes, living the compartmentalized life of a spy not only meant lying to the nation’s highest intelligence agencies, but it also meant lying to the people closest to her, including her family.
Four members of his immediate family worked at the Federal Bureau of Investigations, including his sister, Lucy. Like the rest of the world, they learned that Montes was a Cuban government spy the day she was arrested.
Mr Popkin, who spent time interviewing the family for his book, said when he was arrested the family’s anger at his betrayal was tinged with relief.
“It relieved [Lucy] just to be able to understand a little more about her sister and why their relationship, which had once been so close, had deteriorated over the years,” he said.
Ana Montes has served most of her 25-year prison sentence and was released on January 6.
Now that she’s out of prison and back home in Puerto Rico, Montes said she hopes to live “a quiet, private existence.”
But hours after her release, Montes also said she was still thinking about Cuba.
“I encourage those who wish to focus on me to focus on important issues instead, such as the serious issues facing the Puerto Rican people or the US economic embargo on Cuba,” she said in a statement. shared with BBC News through his lawyer, Linda. Backiel.
“Who in the last 60 years has asked the Cuban people if they want the United States to impose a suffocating embargo on them that makes them suffer?
But for Mr. Lapp and the men and women who fought to bring her to justice for years, Montes’s freedom was a blow.
“I knew that day was coming, but that doesn’t mean it still doesn’t sting,” he said.
