Posted on 08/27/2007 1:28:16 PM PDT by anymouse
The war in Afghanistan probably would have gone differently had this woman not been caught before she could tip the Cubans to our plans, which they surely would have shared with the Taliban, al Queda and others who hate America and are willing to pay or trade for our secrets.
ncis ping
Liberals...
...we have them figured. Ana’s just the latest proof.
Thanks for the post.
gotta read this when I get home ping
"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 former president Bill Clinton may have overlooked Cuba as a potential threat because of Montes' influence and the way she shaped her reporting at DIA."
Socialism thy name is Woman.
What a despicable traitor ... chilling. I detest that we’re paying for her 3 square a day in a decent prison. She should be rotting in one like a Cuban prison.
Just thinking about what Cuba passed to Russia/Putin alone is cause for huge queasiness .. especially now with Castro so near the end.
PING ~~!
Her twenty five year sentence was lenient.
~snip~
Ana had at her fingertips, through our computer systems, instant and direct access to the US governments innermost secrets about just about every other nation on earth. It is an unimaginable amount of extremely sensitive information. A mountain of insider information. And Ana was in a position to give it all away.
~snip~
This is chilling..
Have you seen this?
Oh no. Prison is too good for her kind. The penalty for treason should always be death. Execution by hanging, or say firing squad, either one would do the job nicely.
ping
I’ll say .. I don’t understand why she was allowed a plea deal with such a trivial sentence relative to the grave unknown damage that’ll hurt US for years.
This NY Slimes author is blind to the fact that deaths WERE caused by her outrageous actions ... at least one, as mentioned in this book.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
http://www.ciponline.org/cuba/cubainthenews/newsarticles/nyt032002golden.htm
Last Updated:5/22/03
Pentagon’s Top Cuba Expert Pleads Guilty to Espionage
By Tim Golden
The New York Times
March 20, 2002
WASHINGTON, March 19 Ana B. Montes, an intelligence analyst who was the Pentagon’s top expert on Cuba, pleaded guilty to an espionage charge today, admitting that she spied for the Cuban government for 16 years because she opposed United States policy toward Havana.
Ms. Montes, 45, acknowledged in Federal District Court here that she had revealed the identities of four American undercover intelligence officers and provided the Cuban authorities with reams of other secret and top-secret military and intelligence information.
She was not paid for her efforts, lawyers in the case said, and was just reimbursed for some travel expenses.
“Ms. Montes engaged in the activity that resulted in this charge because of her moral belief that United States policy does not afford Cubans respect, tolerance and understanding,” her lead lawyer, Plato Cacheris, said in a statement. “Ms. Montes was motivated by her desire to help the Cuban people and did not receive any financial benefits.”
Under her plea bargain, Ms. Montes will be sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment and 5 years’ probation on a single count of conspiracy to commit espionage.
She is obliged to submit to extensive debriefings and lie-detector tests by American intelligence and law-enforcement officials who will try to assess the damage she caused to national security.
The death penalty, although contemplated under the law, was never seriously threatened by the prosecutors, lawyers said.
Ms. Montes’s plea confirms the most serious penetration of the United States intelligence community ever by President Fidel Castro’s Communist government. It was met by silence from Cuban diplomats here.
“There is no comment,” a spokesman for the Cuban diplomatic mission, Luis M. Fernandez, said.
The plea was announced a day after an appeal by Havana for greater cooperation with Washington. In a flurry of official statements on Monday, the Cuban authorities said they hoped to reach new accords with Washington on migration, drug control and fighting terrorism.
A spokesman for the State Department, Richard A. Boucher, acknowledged today that Cuba had taken steps to cooperate with the United States on law-enforcement matters in recent years. But Mr. Boucher said that any more formal accords would not be possible until Cuba demonstrated “a willingness to work across the board with us on law- enforcement issues.”
Such a commitment, he said, was “completely absent.”
Ms. Montes’s case was resolved two months after the last of 10 Cuban intelligence officers and agents were sentenced on espionage charges in federal court in Miami.
Law-enforcement officials declined to say whether the case of the Miami spies, known as the Wasp network, was linked to Ms. Montes’s.
***The officials said no harm befell the American intelligence officers whose identities Ms. Montes had betrayed.***
((Tell that to the family of Greg Fronius)))
The assistant F.B.I. director in charge of the Washington field office, Van A. Harp, described the episode as “a classic espionage case” unraveled by careful counterintelligence work.
Starting in December 2000, officials said, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents investigating Ms. Montes placed her under surveillance as she shuttled in a Toyota sedan between her house near the Washington zoo and her office at the Defense Intelligence Agency analysis center at Bolling Air Force Base.
Officials said the agents surreptitiously copied the hard drive of a refurbished laptop computer that Ms. Montes used to encrypt and decrypt the messages that she exchanged with Cuban intelligence officers and recovered messages that documented those contacts.
In other searches of her apartment, the agents found a portable shortwave radio that Ms. Montes used to listen to coded messages from the Cubans and numeric codes that could be used to send messages like “danger” to a pager number used by intelligence officers assigned to the Cuban mission to the United Nations.
The codes were written on water-soluble paper that could be quickly destroyed if necessary.
Still, Ms. Montes’s story is in many ways a new chapter in the annals of American espionage. Born on a United States military base in Germany to Puerto Rican parents, Ms. Montes was raised in suburbs of Topeka, Kan., and Baltimore before attending the University of Virginia.
She received a master’s in international relations from the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies in Washington in 1988 and worked briefly for the Justice Department before joining the D.I.A., the Pentagon’s intelligence arm, in September 1985.
By then, court documents show, she was already working for the Cuban Directorate of Intelligence, but officials would not say how or when she was recruited.
Friends and former colleagues of Ms. Montes said she was extremely discreet about her political beliefs, which many people had guessed were moderately conservative.
At the Defense Intelligence Agency, she worked first on Nicaraguan issues in the Reagan administration campaign to oust the Sandinista government and moved to Cuban affairs after the conflicts in Central America ended.
She was widely viewed by intelligence officers and policy makers as a first-rate analyst. She was selected for the Exceptional Analyst Program in 1992 and later traveled to Cuba to study how the military adapted to the economic collapse after Soviet-era subsidies had ended.
In 1998, officials said, Ms. Montes wrote the first draft of a widely noted Defense Department report that held that Cuba no longer posed a significant military threat to the United States.
But the final report, which provoked outrage from Cuban- American legislators, was a consensus product of Cuba analysts from across the American intelligence community.
In her striped prison jumpsuit, Ms. Montes looked pale and thin from months of solitary confinement. Asked by Judge Ricardo M. Urbina about the accusations against her, she replied firmly, “Those statements are true and correct.”
Under her plea, she forfeits government contributions to her pension, but with time discounted for good behavior, she could be released after a little more than 20 years. She is to be sentenced on Sept. 24.
~~~~~~~~
http://www.blythe.org/nytransfer-subs/Caribbean/Miami_Herald_Toots_the_CIA’s_Horn_on_Cuban_’Spies';
The Miami Herald - June 16, 2002
She led two lives — dutiful analyst, and spy for Cuba
by Tim Johnson
PARKVILLE, Md. - In a brief e-mail message laden with emotion, the
mother of Ana Belen Montes — a top spy for Cuba — lays bare the
anguish she feels over her daughter’s plight.
“We do not agree with what Ana did but I still love her very much,”
Emilia B. Montes wrote to a reporter. “She was my first born, a very
good daughter who never gave me any heartaches until now. She is
still a good, smart and loving person. She had the best intentions,
[but] just went about it the wrong way.”
Exactly how Ana Montes went the “wrong way” is not obvious at first
glance, a worrisome phenomenon at a time when investigators are
searching for telltale signs of alienation in order to spot potential
terrorists.
Indeed, Montes appears to have enjoyed an all-American upbringing.
But a more probing look reveals the contours of an emotional makeup
that may have led her to betray her country — and even her family —
to become the most important known spy for Cuba to penetrate the U.S.
intelligence apparatus.
Meticulous and trim, the 45-year-old Montes seemed the antithesis of
a rebel. She had climbed a career ladder at the super-secret Defense
Intelligence Agency, becoming the most senior analyst on Cuba. She
carefully saved her substantial salary, kept her apartment neat, went
to the gym almost daily and kept to routine. She refrained from
gossip, even with her most loyal friends. If anyone seemed safe and
reliable, it was Ana Montes.
But somewhere along the way, Montes entered a labyrinth of mirrors
where deceit and reality intermingle. When she emerged, even her own
family did not recognize her.
“I’m still flabbergasted,” her mother said in a brief telephone
conversation, talking with more than a little reticence. “We waited
and waited to find out it wasn’t true.”
No such luck. In March, Montes confessed in U.S. District Court to
one count of conspiracy to commit espionage. She had become a crown
jewel for the Cuban intelligence service, one of the most effective
in the world. Experts say she spilled a flood of secrets to her Cuban
handlers.
“They wanted everything. They just sucked everything out of her,”
said one security official knowledgeable about the case. “[Fidel]
Castro trades in this kind of information.”
A LIFE OF PERIL
Clandestine activities belied no-risk demeanor
Close friends were stricken. They discovered that Ana Montes, who
seemed to shun risk, led a life of enormous peril. She rose at odd
hours to listen to high-frequency coded messages from Havana. She
trooped from one pay phone to another to send beeper messages. And
she disappeared on exotic vacations — often alone.
“Her family is devastated, her reputation is ruined, and her money
and all that is gone,” said an old friend, who insisted on anonymity.
It is no ordinary family. Montes has a brother who works for the FBI
in the Atlanta area and a sister who is a translator for the FBI in
South Florida. The sister helped bring down a large Cuban spy ring,
the so-called Wasp Network, last year.
Montes is now held in a secret location, where debriefers are
assessing the damage she caused. The Justice Department says Montes
began working for Cuban intelligence by 1985. They now know whether
she was a “walk-in” who offered her services, or whether she was
recruited or blackmailed to work for Havana. But they are not sharing
what they know.
And they won’t reveal it until Montes appears in September for
sentencing. It is then that a judge will hand her a 25-year term, and
five additional years of parole, if federal officials attest that she
has cooperated fully.
NO SIGN OF ENRICHMENT
Motivation seemed to come from ideology and emotion
By all indications, Montes did not receive a penny for her betrayal.
She worked for Havana out of ideological conviction, dismay at U.S.
policy, and perhaps an amalgam of emotions sown in adolescence along
the leafy streets of this northern Baltimore suburb.
It is here that Montes began to battle most strongly with her father,
Alberto L. Montes, a Freudian psychoanalyst who dealt sternly with
his four children and tried to inculcate his conservative values in
them.
“He was a very strict disciplinarian,” recalled Emilia Montes, who
later divorced her husband. “When I was young, people used to say
that the children of psychiatrists have problems. They clashed. He
was strong-willed, very much like her.”
Dr. Montes, who was born in Puerto Rico in 1928, went to medical
school in upstate New York, then joined the Army in 1956, going first
to West Germany, where Ana was born, then moving with his family to
Topeka, Kan., for seven years. He specialized in adult psychiatry at
the respected Menninger Clinic.
By the time the Montes family moved to the Baltimore suburbs in 1967,
the father had quit the Army and the family appeared to live the
American Dream. Dr. Montes earned a large income in private practice,
the family lived on a cul-de-sac in an upper middle-class
neighborhood, and the children attended top-notch public schools.
“Dr. Montes was a good psychiatrist, very well regarded in the
community,” said a fellow psychiatrist, Jaime Lievano, who still
lives in Baltimore. “He had specific training in Freudian analysis.”
The family clung to its Puerto Rican roots, even as Ana Montes and
her younger sister and two younger brothers stood out at the local
Loch Raven High School for their Hispanic heritage.
“Look at the faces,” Principal G. Keith Harmeyer said as he flipped
through the school yearbook for 1975, when Ana Montes graduated. Only
two other students had Hispanic surnames.
Next to her senior photo, Ana Montes noted that her favorite things
were “summer, beaches, soccer, Stevie W., P.R., chocolate chip
cookies, having a good time with fun people.”
While Dr. Montes kept his psychiatric practice at a local clinic, his
wife developed her own career as an investigator for a federal
employment anti-discrimination office, and grew active in Hispanic
community affairs.
It is there that Emilia Montes had a serious run-in with Cuban
exiles.
“The Cubans and I had our encounters. They don’t fight clean,” she
said, speaking with a candor that appears to be part of her feisty
nature.
A SPAT WITH EXILES
Mother was involved in immigrant activism
Even today, Hispanic community activists remember the spat in the
mid-1970s, when Emilia Montes led a federation of Hispanic immigrants
from all over Latin America in a quest for a slot in a Showcase of
Nations city festival.A rival group of well-connected Cuban exiles
said that it should win the slot.
“Emilia Montes said, “This is not true. The Cubans don’t represent
everybody. We’ve got more than just Cubans around here, said Javier
Bustamante, a fellow activist.
“They had a knock-down, drag-out fight,” added Bustamante, who is
from Spain.
Backed by the umbrella Federation of Hispanic Organizations, and
speaking on her local radio program, Emilia Montes succeeded in
defeating the Cuban exile group.
“She was out for the little guy,” recalled Jose Ruiz, who is a city
liaison with the Hispanic community. Chuckling, he added: “She was a
character. She had her moments.”
By 1977, when Ana Montes had left the family home and was attending
the University of Virginia, the parents fell into an acrimonious
divorce and custody battle for the two youngest children, Alberto M.
and Juan Carlos.
The court awarded Mrs. Montes custody of the two sons, the family
home and a 1974 Plymouth, and a small alimony.
If Ana Montes ever mended her troubled relationship with her father,
it wasn’t readily apparent.
“At one point, she actually wrote him a letter trying to make peace
with her past,” recalled a friend of Ana’s from her time at the
University of Virginia. “He wrote back. He was totally unapologetic.”
Dr. Montes eventually remarried, rejoined the Army and moved to the
Hawaiian island of Oahu. He retired from the Army in 1995 with the
rank of colonel, divorced his second wife and moved to South Florida,
where he died of a heart attack two years ago.
Ana Montes graduated from the University of Virginia in 1979 with a
degree in foreign affairs. She moved to Washington, D.C., where she
enrolled in 1982 in a two-year master’s degree program at the School
of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She
focused on Latin America. Her degree was not awarded until 1988.
While she was studying, Montes got a clerical job at the Department
of Justice that required a security clearance. She moved to the
Defense Intelligence Agency as a junior analyst, focusing on
Nicaragua, in September 1985.
By then, she already was a spy for Cuba.
How the Cuban intelligence service enlisted Montes is the subject of
endless speculation among Cuba watchers. Some say it was a romance.
Others say it was blackmail. Still others, including her lawyer and
her mother, say it was sympathy for a small nation in the shadow of a
colossus.
“She felt sorry for the Cubans,” Emilia Montes said of her daughter.
“It wasn’t Castro. It was seeing them living in misery. She was very
young and idealistic.”
Wherever the truth, Ana Montes rubbed elbows with scores of people
inside and outside the Pentagon, on Capitol Hill and at the State
Department, taking part in and eventually leading briefings on Cuba.
Colleagues and acquaintances describe her as no-nonsense.
“She was an unusual person,” said an official who knew her casually
and like many of her acquaintances declined to speak for attribution.
“She could be very warm and engaging on a personal level. She was
kind of witty. She had a very sharp mind. But when you’re discussing
work or in a work environment, she could be very aloof and dogmatic.”
PRESSURE TO MARRY
Boyfriend was employed by U.S. Southern Command
Montes dated occasionally, and like many daughters of Hispanic
mothers came under pressure to find a partner and head to the altar.
‘Her mom was on her all the time: “Why aren’t you married?’ “
recalled the old friend.
Montes did, in fact, have a boyfriend in recent times — Roger
Corneretto, a civilian employee in Miami of the U.S. Southern
Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the hemisphere,
including Cuba.
“She was going to get married,” said Lilian Laszlo, a Baltimore
resident and close friend of Emilia Montes.
Corneretto was transferred to the Joint Chiefs of Staff office in the
Pentagon after Montes’ arrest last year, shocked and grieving at the
discovery of his girlfriend’s double life.
Corneretto declined to talk with The Herald.
Montes is known to have traveled to New York City regularly, as well
as to have taken overseas vacations alone to places like the
Dominican Republic, where she may have received Cuban training to
master the coded radio messages and computer decoding software that
her espionage demanded.
How U.S. counterintelligence agents got onto Montes is not clear.
A former Cuban Interior Ministry cryptographer, Jose Cohen, who now
lives in exile in South Florida, said he believes U.S.
counterintelligence engineered a huge feat by cracking an encrypted
Cuban message, perhaps to Montes.
“It is easier to win the lottery three times over than to break these
codes,” Cohen said.
APARTMENT SEARCHED
FBI reportedly found evidence on computer
Whatever the tip-off, FBI agents 13 months ago searched Montes’
apartment and surreptitiously copied the hard drive of her Toshiba
laptop computer, recovering 11 pages of text between her and Cuban
intelligence agents, court documents say. Montes’ failure to fully
erase the material appeared to be an act of carelessness unusual for
her.
The Justice Department says Montes had turned over photos, documents
and abundant classified material to Cuba. It says she revealed the
identity of four undercover U.S. agents, handed over information
about U.S. military games, and provided assessments to Cuba taken
from the most top-secret internal files of the Defense Intelligence
Agency.
Montes, with a top-level clearance, had access to the Intelink
computer network that connects about 60 federal intelligence, defense
and civilian agencies involved in intelligence gathering and
assessment.
“She had access to basically everything,” the security official said.
“You’re talking about programs that cost millions of dollars to
develop. And she could get anything.”
As she funneled secrets, Montes also molded debate about Cuba on
Capitol Hill and at the Pentagon and the State Department. In 1998,
she was a principal drafter of a Pentagon paper that concluded that
Cuba no longer represented a military threat to the United States.
In 1999, Montes was a principal briefer on an inter-agency
war-game-like exercise about Cuba that may have required her to
review U.S. military capabilities toward Cuba should turmoil erupt on
the island, one U.S. official said.
Montes became a “vociferous” advocate of a controversial proposal to
allow active U.S. military personnel into Cuba to develop relations
with officers of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces, the official
said. Critics feared that such a plan would expose U.S. military
personnel to possible recruitment or compromise by Cuban
intelligence.
Normally, with a spy like Montes in their sights, FBI agents would
shadow her for months, even years, with the intention of identifying
her handlers and bringing down an entire network.
But nine days after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the agents swooped
in to arrest Montes, fearing that she represented an overriding
security risk.
To this day, the Montes arrest has not generated the publicity of
other major spy cases, such as the 1994 arrest of Aldrich Ames, a CIA
employee whose betrayal of his country may have cost the lives of
nine U.S. moles in the Soviet Union, and the early 2001 arrest of
Robert Hanssen, a veteran FBI counterintelligence officer who earned
$1.4 million as an agent for Russia.
Some think Montes ranks in the league of major turncoats.
“You could make the case that the potential for damage was more
severe than with either Hanssen or Ames,” an official said. “She
could have told them what, where and when [eventual U.S. military
action would occur], and it would cost a hell of a lot of lives.”
As it is, some of the victims are alive and suffering silently.
Montes’ brothers and sisters declined to speak about her.
“I’ll be happy to talk to you sometime down the road, but not right
now,” said Juan Carlos Montes, the youngest sibling at 40, who
operates a restaurant in South Florida.
“I still have sleepless nights,” Montes’ mother said. “Your precious child in handcuffs in a jail. I can’t bear it.”
~~~~~~~~
I hope they go to the limits of serious, withering and long-term interrogation!! We’ll never never know just how badly we are compromised. Lord, protect us.
Any links between Montes and Able Danger? DIA seemed like a pretty stupid place for a while there.
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