Ana Montes: Spying for Cuba

Ana Belén Montes (born February 28, 1957) is a former American senior analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency in the United States and a convicted spy. 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, was sentenced to a 25-year prison term followed by five years' probation.

Montes had been 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 Defence Intelligence Agency.

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 had passed a considerable amount of classified information to the Cuban Intelligence Directorate, including the identities of four US 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 US Army camp in El Salvador. 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).

Carmichael, who had 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. Carmichael characterized the damage Montes caused to the DIA and other US 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.