Ana Montes, Former U.S. Intelligence Analyst Who Spied For Cuba, Is Released

January 9, 2023 4:15 pm

Ana Montes, a U.S. intelligence officer convicted of spying for the Cuban government, was released from prison Friday after more than 20 years, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Montes, 65, was the top military and political analyst working on Cuban affairs at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) when she was arrested in 2001 as the result of an FBI investigation. She was granted early release from federal prison in Fort Worth, largely on account of good behavior.

For almost 17 years, Montes gathered secret U.S. government information and passed it on to intelligence officers in Havana. She disclosed the identities of at least four U.S. officers covertly operating in Cuba, provided classified photos and documents, and divulged information about eavesdropping technology covertly installed on the island, essentially compromising every method the United States used to surveil the Castro regime, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials. That makes Montes one of the most damaging spies of her time, they said.

Montes accessed sensitive information in her role as a senior analyst for Cuban affairs at the DIA, the agency responsible for providing military intelligence about foreign countries, where she had worked since 1985. Within seven years, she had been promoted as the agency’s top official working on Cuba and was responsible for sharing secret U.S. government information on Havana with other federal agencies.

Unknown to her colleagues, who heralded her the “Queen of Cuba,” Montes was feeding that information directly back to Cuban officials.

“Though I knew this day would come, it stings me Montes is now free,” said Pete Lapp, a retired FBI special agent who led the investigation with another agent, Steve McCoy, and ultimately arrested Montes. “Having been in the room and helped the FBI build a very solid, prosecutable case that led to a hefty 25-year prison sentence, what we learned after from her in the debriefing shocked me.”

The FBI had Montes under surveillance and arrested her 10 days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, as the DIA was preparing to assign her to a team that would have access to information about locations the United States might bomb in Afghanistan.

“Her intent to spy for the Cubans, if not arrested, against our warfighters in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks would have risked lives,” said Lapp, who co-authored a book about the case, “Queen of Cuba,” scheduled to be published in October.

According to federal prosecutors, Montes was motivated by ideology and not financial incentive. She was never paid for anything but expenses, they told the court.

“I obeyed my conscience rather than the law,” Montes told the judge who sentenced her in 2002 to 25 years in prison following her conviction for conspiracy to commit espionage. “I believe our government’s policy toward Cuba is cruel and unfair, profoundly unneighborly, and I felt morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system upon it,” she said.

In a statement ahead of her release, members of Montes’s family said she had “committed treason against this country and the people of our nation. We continue to disavow what she did and any statements she has made or may make.”

Senior Cuban officials publicly praised Montes after she was caught by the FBI, portraying her as an ideological ally.

According to the FBI, Montes communicated with her Cuban handlers via shortwave radios, computer diskettes and pagers, The Post reported in 2001.

Federal agents obtained court approval in 2001 to enter Montes’s apartment, where they discovered a shortwave radio, an earpiece and a laptop. They secretly copied the computer’s hard drive and restored deleted text, uncovering evidence that provided foundations to the allegations against Montes, according to an FBI affidavit.

Agents began following Montes and observed her making brief calls on pay phones outside the National Zoo, gas stations and other locations in Northwest Washington and Maryland, apparently sending encrypted messages to pagers, the affidavit said.

Montes was arrested on Sept. 21, 2001, at Bolling Air Force Base, the DIA’s head office in Washington, and FBI agents led her out of the building in handcuffs.

“She was just a very efficient spy, quiet, kind of unassuming and devastating to U.S. national security because of that,” Jim Popkin, author of a new book on Montes, told Washington Post Live in an interview Thursday, the day before her release.

According to Popkin, Montes kept a low profile at the DIA, rarely removing documents and preferring to commit sensitive intelligence to memory instead.

“Everything was in her head, and so day job would end approximately five o’clock. She’d go home, maybe work out, and she lived in a condo in Cleveland Park on Macomb Street and thus begins her night job, which was typing that classified information into her Toshiba laptop,” Popkin said. “Nearly 17 years of classified information she’s typing in virtually every day, and then she would take that, put it on disks, and meet, when convenient and when safe, with her handlers in Washington or Cuba.”

According to the FBI, authorities were first alerted to Montes in 1996 when one of her DIA colleagues raised suspicions “on gut feeling” that she was acting for Cuban intelligence. Montes was interviewed by a security official, but no action was taken, the FBI said.

Four years later, when the security official learned the FBI was working to identify a suspected Cuban agent believed to be operating in Washington, he contacted the FBI about Montes and prompted its agents to open their investigation into her.

U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina ruled in 2002 that upon her release, Montes should be placed under supervision for five years, during which time her internet and computer usage would be monitored and unpermitted contact with foreign governments forbidden. Any conditions attached to her release Friday were not immediately clear.