True Believer (Cuban DIA Mole Caught Before Spoilling War on Terror)

Frontpage Interview's guest today is Scott W. Carmichael, the senior security and counterintelligence investigator for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). He served as the lead case agent for the DIA on the Ana Montes espionage investigation. He has been investigating attempts by foreign intelligence services to penetrate DIA operations worldwide for nearly twenty years. Prior to that he was a Chinese-Mandarin linguist in the U.S. Navy and a special agent of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. His contributions toward the successful resolution of national security matters have earned Carmichael the DIA Civilian Expeditionary Medal and Award for Meritorious Civilian Service, the Defense Intelligence Director's Award, the Department of Defense Counterintelligence Award, and the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement, among other awards and various forms of recognition. He is the author of the new book, True Believer: Inside the Investigation and Capture of Ana Montes, Cuba's Master Spy.

Carmichael: Thank you for giving me an opportunity to speak about Ana's case. Jamie, I think it's important to educate the public about espionage, and particularly about Cuban intelligence operations targeted against the United States. I look forward to your questions.

FP: Ok, before we get into Ana’s case, let's start first with the effect that Cuban intelligence operations directed against the United States have on our collective security. Can you talk a bit about that?

Carmichael: The American people should be very concerned about this issue. Cuba may indeed be but a small island which poses no credible military threat to the United States. But the intelligence threat which she poses is enormous. It is enormous because the Cuban intelligence service (CUIS) is very professional and capable; CUIS is highly motivated to penetrate the United States government; it has demonstrated past success at accomplishing that mission; the relative ease with which CUIS recruited Ana suggests that it would be relatively easy for CUIS to recruit others among us, and, given their capability and motivation, we must assume that they have done so; finally, and most importantly, the government of Cuba almost certainly shares intelligence obtained from agents among us with other governments whose interests may be inimical to our own. That information can be used against us. It can be used to kill our kids in uniform.

Carmichael: Ana was recruited in 1984. Back then, she was a 27 year old graduate student at Johns Hopkins University's School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C., and she was employed on a full-time basis by the Department of Justice as a processor of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) appeals. She held a Top Secret security clearance while so employed, and that clearance was based on the results of an FBI background investigation.

Ana was very vocal about her disagreement with the Reagan administration's policies vis-à-vis Central America, back then. When the Cuban government learned of her views, through their many eyes and ears in the Washington, D.C. area, they simply asked Ana whether she would be willing to assist them. She agreed. And it was just that easy for the Cuban Intelligence Service to recruit her. If you were to ask Ana today whether she felt disloyal to the United States, she would probably tell you that she meant no harm to the United States, but only wished to support the Nicaraguan people and the Cuban people in their pursuit of freedom from American influence. She would not regard her own actions as disloyal.

Carmichael: The Cubans suggested to Ana that she might be of greater assistance to their cause if she had a job which provided access to information which had great value to Cuba. Ana acted on their suggestion by applying for employment with a number of federal agencies in Washington, D.C. Since she already held a Top Secret security clearance, along with a bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia and a master's degree from Johns Hopkins University, she was a very competitive job applicant. DIA hired her in September 1985. She was already a fully recruited Cuban spy, by then, and she continued to serve as their spy from within DIA for the next 16 years.

DIA did learn about Ana's views regarding the US government's policies in Central America. The security office addressed those views on several occasions, back in 1986 and 1991 and, again, in 1996, and a number of security officials even expressed serious concerns about her suitability for access to sensitive information. But in the end, risk-management judgments were made in her favor. After all, many people disagreed with the Reagan administration's policies in Central America back then (remember the Iran-Contra affair, and Congressional disagreement with the administration's policies and actions in Central America during the late 1980's?). Disagreement with government policies did not equate to disloyalty. And no evidence existed at that time to suggest that Ana Montes was a spy, so she retained her security clearance.

It's a complicated issue. I might add that, in a general sense, her co-workers liked and respected Ana, and her supervisors absolutely loved her. She seemed to be a tireless worker, with a great work ethic and attitude, who more than carried her share of the work load. In fact, she appeared to be a model employee. And in March 1994, Ana successfully completed a polygraph examination, even though, by then, she had already spied for Cuba for ten years. Don't ask me how she managed to do that. But she certainly appeared to be a great employee, and only one of her colleagues ever voiced counterintelligence concerns about Ana directly to the security office at DIA.

Carmichael: In a nutshell, it was one of her colleagues. His name is Reginald Brown. Reg first approached my wife to express concerns about Ana. That was in April 1996. My wife was employed by DIA at the time; she and Reg were very good friends and colleagues at work. My wife referred Reg to me, since I was employed by DIA as a mole hunter and it was my job to resolve counterintelligence concerns about DIA employees. Reg was very hesitant to speak with me, at first. He was concerned that he might be wrong about Ana, and he didn't want to point a finger of suspicion at an innocent person. But I assured Reg that I would act discreetly; he then confided to me his growing concerns that Ana might be a spy.

I interviewed Ana later that year to resolve concerns raised by Reg regarding Ana's involvement in some very specific actions which had occurred earlier in the year. Reg thought that Cuban intelligence might have directed Ana to act on those occasions. Well, Ana answered my questions very satisfactorily, and we were able to determine that, in fact, Cuban intelligence had not directed Ana to take action in any of the incidents cited by Reg Brown. She seemed to be 'good to go', and it appeared that Reg was wrong in his assessment of Ana Montes. But during my interview with Ana in 1996, she did leave me with a nagging 'gut feeling' that something was not quite right about Ana Montes. Several years then passed. In the fall of 2000, I learned that the FBI had reason to believe that there was a Cuban spy operating in Washington, D.C. I approached the FBI and managed to persuade them that Ana might be the person they were looking for. They agreed to open a case, and the rest is history.

Carmichael: Reg Brown has been an employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency for about 20 years, now. He is still employed by DIA, and he happens to be a very good friend of mine and my wife. Reg Brown is an analyst. He is one of many employees of DIA whose jobs are to collect bits and pieces of information about the capabilities and intentions of potential adversaries of the United States. Analysts review that information to form judgments about foreign plans and intentions.

During the late 1980's and early-mid 1990's, Reg Brown's specialty was counterintelligence, and his particular focus was Cuba. His mission at DIA was to assess the affect that Cuban intelligence operations, worldwide, might have on US military operations worldwide. So, for example, if the United States military planned to conduct operations, say, somewhere in Latin America, Reg would determine as best he could, what the Cuban intelligence service might plan to do, if anything, to counter or interrupt American military operations in the region. Reg was not a mole hunter or a spy hunter - his job was not to find spies among us - but he did have a sense of Cuban intelligence operations and the affect that those operations might have on the United States. Reg Brown and Ana Montes were both Cuba specialists, in a sense, even though they tended to focus on different issues regarding Cuba. Reg and Ana did not work together, in the same office, but they were colleagues and they did occasionally interact on common/Cuban issues. You could say that Reg knew Ana professionally, at work.

FP: So tell us how Ana was arrested. What were some of the first serious clues? How did you end up cracking the case and getting her?

Carmichael: Many details of the investigation remain sensitive. But I can tell you that the intelligence community had reason to believe that a Cuban agent existed, perhaps somewhere within Washington, D.C. A tiny tidbit of information was known about that agent.

I learned about that tidbit of information in August 2000, and realized instantly that Ana was among many, many people in Washington, D.C., who matched up well with that particular piece of information. I combined that knowledge with Reg Brown's gut feelings about Ana, and with my own gut feeling about Ana - developed during my November 1996 interview with her - to persuade the FBI to take a serious look at the possibility that Ana Montes was indeed a Cuban agent.

We had no 'evidence', per se, that Ana was a mole. In fact, there was good reason to conclude that Ana Montes was an unlikely suspect. But we were patient, and we worked well together behind the scenes to gather information about Ana's activities. In a sense, we made our own luck, by being persistent and vigilant. We conducted a very discreet, behind-the-scenes investigation into Ana's activities for about a year.

During the course of that investigation, the FBI collected a great deal of circumstantial evidence of Ana's espionage activity - including a number of telephone calls which Ana placed to telephone numbers known or suspected to be affiliated with the Cuban intelligence service.

The investigation was terminated somewhat prematurely owing in part to 9/11. President Bush had declared a Global War on Terrorism, and ordered the Department of Defense to prepare a plan to attack Al Qaeda's base in Afghanistan - Operation Enduring Freedom. The Defense Intelligence Agency was naturally involved in the planning for that operation, and Ana had been selected by her supervisors (who were ignorant of our investigation) to serve as a team leader for DIA analysts who were scheduled to receive detailed war planning documents on Saturday 22, September 2001. We could not allow Ana to gain access to that material, of course, so a decision was made to place her under arrest during the mid-morning hours on Friday 21, September 2001, at work, before she could access the war plans.

We ran a bit of a ruse on her, to separate Ana from her co-workers, by calling her down to the office of DIA's Inspector General on a routine matter. When Ana arrived, she was met by the FBI case agents, who placed her under arrest.

She didn't say anything at all, and she showed no emotion whatsoever. As she was about to be escorted from the building, I stood in her path for a moment to allow some members of the arrest team to pass by. Ana certainly knew who I was. I had interviewed her just four years earlier, and during that interview I suggested to Ana that she might be a Cuban spy. I am certain that she walked away from that interview convinced that she had managed to slip by me. As she stood directly in front of me, she averted her gaze and refused to even look at me. She remains unrepentant, to this day.

Carmichael: Ana's family members and her former boyfriend were victims of her espionage activity. They neither knew of her activity nor even suspected that she was involved in espionage. In fact, Ana went way out of her way to ensure that they did not find out. It is unfortunate that her family members and former boyfriend may have been tainted by Ana's actions - in that sense, they were unknowing and innocent victims. The impact had to be deep and lasting. I doubt they will ever fully recover. Ana's actions were extremely selfish, on many levels, and she is paying for the damage (exceptionally grave) which she caused to our collective security, but she can never repay the damage that she caused to her family and her former boyfriend.

Her co-workers were devastated by Ana's arrest and her actions. They felt betrayal both on professional and personal levels. Remember that, Ana worked intimately at DIA with a small group of people - all Latin America specialists. She had worked for many years alongside them, seated right next to some of them, daily, for up to 15 years. A number of them broke down when she was arrested, and none of them will ever be the same. The psychological impact upon them ran very deep. Many of them felt that their work for almost two decades was for naught, because Ana compromised everything that they had worked on, throughout their professional careers. They might as well have stayed home rather than work throughout the entire period of time of her espionage activity. The man who actually hired Ana in 1985, continued to serve as her supervisor for the entire period of her espionage activity at DIA, for 16 years. Can you imagine how he felt when she was arrested? He used to hold Ana up to others as the model employee to be emulated by everyone - the perfect employee! He was devastated by her betrayal.

Carmichael: Well, to put it into perspective, remember that Ana Montes was widely recognized throughout the entire US intelligence community as their senior analyst on Cuba. She held a Top Secret security clearance, with authorized access to Special Intelligence - which derived from extremely sensitive sources - throughout her 16 year career as a spy. She had access to our innermost secrets, and she gave everything away to the Cuban intelligence service, for free. She didn't charge them a nickel for that information, and never received any payment for her services to them. The bottom line is that she caused 'exceptionally grave' damage to our national security. Every source and method used by the United States government to collect information about Cuban actions and intentions was compromised. Everything that we knew about Cuba and suspected about Cuba, and everything that we did not know about Cuba, was compromised.

Everything that we planned or intended to do regarding Cuba, was compromised. They had us thoroughly wired. All of our 'contingency plans' regarding Cuba - which the public commonly refers to as 'war plans' - were compromised to the government of Cuba. If the United States military had been directed to take any kind of military action against Cuba throughout Ana's 16 year career, the Cubans would have been ready for us, and could have inflicted casualties on our forces, as a result.

Ana was plugged in to the Seat-of-Government level intelligence and policy apparatus in Washington, D.C., and she was therefore able to provide to the Cuban government true insider information concerning everything that the American government knew, planned, or thought about Cuba. And much more.

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. The true damage to national security, though, might be measured in terms of the compromise of such information not only to Cuba, but to Cuba's friends around the world. You see, we can imagine that Cuba shares information with her friends - with Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, and the People's Republic of China, and others. Ana's information could easily have been spent by the government of Cuba like currency, shared with Cuba's friends in order to advance Cuba's own interests.

Some of the countries which I mention above are not entirely friendly toward the United States. Sharing sensitive information with some of those countries could result in the death of American war fighters around the world - American kids in American uniforms. That is the bottom line on damage assessments when espionage occurs.

FP: So in the context of this story and all of its consequences, how would you say that your book demonstrates how Cuba, despite its small size, is a major security threat to the United States?

Carmichael: My book conveys to the reader the relative ease with which an otherwise intelligent person of great potential can be recruited by a professional and capable Cuban intelligence service to serve the interests of the Castro regime, and thereby cause great harm to the United States.

If the Cubans did it once, we must assume that they have done it many times, over the years - and that, therefore, many Ana Montes's could be among us today. The information which such agents provide to the government of Cuba can be shared by the government of Cuba with any other nation or group of people on earth, including nations and organizations which intend us harm.

It would be naïve to imagine that Cuba does not do so. Cuba represents a major security threat to the United States, not because of her military capability - which may be minimal - but because of her proven ability and dogged determination to recruit agents among us in order to do us harm.

FP: What are your overall views of the FBI? Should we have confidence in the agency?

Carmichael: The FBI deserves our full confidence and support. True, that agency must be held to account for systemic failings and weaknesses, and it is also true that individual employees occasionally falter - the agency is not perfect, but in toto it remains the most effective law enforcement agency in the world, and it faithfully serves to shield the American people from threats to their freedom.

FBI Special Agents and support employees are absolutely top notch - intelligent, well trained, motivated, and dedicated to their mission. They want to do a good job for us, and to do that in a lawful manner. I've worked directly with the FBI on national security matters, on an almost daily basis, for more than 20 years - I therefore have some experience in working with that agency, and I know what I am talking about.

Confidence in the FBI translates into cooperation with the FBI. The American people need to have sufficient confidence in the FBI to cooperate by sharing information with the FBI. In this case, by providing investigative leads to the FBI concerning CUIS operations in the United States. We need people like Reg Brown to step forward and express their counterintelligence concerns, and thereby give professional investigators - FBI agents - an opportunity to address and resolve those concerns. The FBI is good, but they can't do it alone. They need information with which to work, and the American people - especially federal employees, but not solely federal employees - are their best source of information about suspected espionage activity. People therefore need to step up and cooperate with the FBI by volunteering information about suspected espionage. Let's stop bashing the Bureau, and instead support the good people of that agency who work for us.

I was not at all surprised to learn, after Ana's arrest, that a number of people in her life questioned the government's employment of Ana Montes at all, given her views toward US government policy, and that a number of colleagues in the intelligence community expressed not surprise at her arrest but some sense of vindication of their own feelings and views about Ana Montes prior to the arrest ('I knew it! I told you so! I'm not surprised!), and that some colleagues had even warned others of their suspicions or concerns that Ana might be a spy - and yet, none of those people (except Reg Brown) stepped forward to express those concerns directly to the FBI or to agents of DIA's security office, who could have taken steps earlier to resolve concerns about Ana. People who harbour suspicions need to have confidence that the FBI will handle those suspicions in a responsible manner, and that the FBI will work quietly and discreetly behind the scenes to resolve those concerns. We might catch a few more spies, earlier, if people who harbor suspicions or concerns step forward.

FP: Let’s get back to Ana Montes. Why is she unrepentant? What is the mindset of this particular individual who served a monstrous tyranny?

Carmichael: She continues to believe that she did the right thing. I am not psychologist, but I believe that Ana simply must continue to hold onto that view. Otherwise, she would fall apart. She has so rationalized her own actions that she is now incapable of viewing those actions in terms of the harm that she caused.

I believe the final chapter in my book puts her actions into a proper perspective. The final chapter is entitled, Death of a War Fighter. It recounts the circumstances of the death, during the early morning hours of 31 March 1987, of a young American Green Beret in El Salvador. His name was Greg Fronius, and he was assigned to train El Salvadoran Army troops in basic infantry tactics at their army base in El Salvador. During the early morning hours of 31 March 1987, that base was overrun by Cuban-backed insurgent forces, and Greg was killed in action while very heroically defending the base from that attack. Greg received the silver star for his actions that morning, and, believe me, he earned it.

Ana Montes visited Greg's base just weeks before the attack took place. She returned to Washington, D.C. after that visit and met with Cuban intelligence officials to tell them everything that she had learned during her trip to El Salvador. We don't know exactly what Ana told the Cubans about Greg's base, but it could have enabled them to better prepare for their attack on that base. I believe that Ana Montes shares some responsibility for the death of that young man - one of America's finest war fighters; a Green Beret who was just doing his duty. Ana Montes was quite literally sworn to support that young man, but she chose instead to betray him; and he subsequently, perhaps consequently, died at the hands of Cuban-backed insurgents. How could she do that? I don't know. I can't relate to it. But I do believe that, if Ana Montes were ever to accept some measure of responsibility for that young man's death, she would fall apart. But, psychologically, she simply won't go there. She can't 'go there'. She chooses, instead, to stand by her belief that she did the right thing. It's twisted, I know. But there it is.

FP: I wonder if Ana Montes is going to read Against All Hope by Armando Valladares while she’s in prison. She used the freedom and prosperity given to her by her nation to damage her nation, to bolster a fascist regime and to help torture courageous heroes such as Armando. I guess some human beings voluntarily choose to live a spiritual life in a sewer.

Scott Carmichael thank you for the tremendous service you have done and continue to do for our nation and for freedom. It was a privilege to speak with you.

Carmichael: Ana will always be a True Believer. She will always believe that her actions were morally correct. As intelligent and well-educated as she is, Ana may nevertheless be incapable of seeing the truth that she betrayed everyone - her family, her friends, her co-workers, and all Americans who entrusted their collective security to her.

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.

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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.

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