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.'' [--Sells it to other countries???]
…………… 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.***
But members of the country's illegal but tolerated dissident groups said the "referendum" -- which allows only a yes vote or an abstention -- was a transparent ploy to foil Cuban aspirations to democracy. "This shows the fundamentalism of the government," said high-profile dissident Elizardo Sanchez Santa Cruz of the opposition Cuban Human Rights Commission. "They are trying to head off the Varela Project," he said, refering to a petition bearing more than 11,000 signatures seeking a referendum on political pluralism and market-minded economic change.***