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<p>Ana Belen Montes, a former high-ranking Cuba analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, was released from prison Friday after more than 20 years behind bars at a federal prison in Texas.</p><p>Montes, 65, was released early after pleading guilty to conspiring to commit espionage as part of a plea deal in 2002.</p>

We all knew Obama winning the election would be bad. But did any of you really believe it could be this bad? Every day is just another astounding move of stupidity, treason, or both. Witness: If you were president of the United States, would you hire an alleged former spy for Fidel Castro to be ambassador to El Salvador, a country teetering on the brink of hard-core socialism? President Obama just did. On Dec. 9, Obama nominated Mari Del Carmen Aponte to be ambassador to El Salvador, despite the fact that in the late 1990s, the FBI discovered that she...

Ana Montes, who is regarded as "one of the most damaging spies," has been released from a prison in Texas. Montes, now 65, worked for the US Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, as the top analyst on Cuba during the Cold War. Washington knew her as the "Queen of Cuba" for her insights into Fidel Castro's communist regime.

Up until last week, it looked like Gerardo Hernandez would spend the rest of his life behind bars. Part of a spy cabal known as the “Cuban Five,” Hernandez had been in federal prison since 1998, serving out two consecutive life sentences for espionage. But in a prisoner exchange to free detained American contractor Alan Gross, Hernandez and two other members of the “Cuban Five” were released. At a public homecoming event, Hernandez was seen rubbing his wife Adriana Perez’s pregnant belly. He returned home just in time for the birth of their child, who they’d conceived long distance with...

President Obama's recent nominee for ambassador to El Salvador was forced to withdraw her nomination to another diplomatic post a decade ago following concerns about ties to Cuba, raising red flags as her name heads to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee once again for approval. President Obama's recent nominee for ambassador to El Salvador was forced to withdraw her nomination to another diplomatic post a decade ago following concerns about ties to Cuba, raising red flags as her name heads to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee once again for approval. The White House announced the nomination of Mari Del Carmen...

President Barack Obama has nominated Mari Carmen Aponte to become the next ambassador of El Salvador, a decade after she was forced to withdrawal her name from consideration for a similar post following concerns about alleged ties to Cuba, Newsmax.com reports. A former FBI official told Fox News that Aponte’s 1998 nomination by president Clinton began receiving attention after the foreign relations panel questioned her about a past relationship with Roberto Tamayo, who was alleged to have "possible ties to the Cuban government" and made "repeated trips there." Current White House spokesman Tommy Vietor responded, "as has been previously reported,...

This is huge news coming on the heels of Barack Obama’s support for the Ground Zero Mosque. He has appointed Maria del Carmen Aponte to be Ambassador to El Salvador. Three United States Senators have a hold on her nomination. Why? Because she had a longterm relationship with a top Cuban spy. She withdrew as a Clinton appointee back in the 90’s because of it. Senators questioned whether or not Aponte knew about her lover’s spying on the United States and had other serious concerns related to that relationship. How will the American public react when they learn Barack Obama...

Politics: President Obama hit a new low in using a recess appointment to name Maria del Carmen Aponte as U.S. envoy to El Salvador. The radical has consorted with Cuban spies but will be taking no questions. Dismissing three congressional holds on Aponte's ambassadorial confirmation as "playing politics," Obama used his vacation to slip Aponte through to represent the U.S. to the strategic Central American country, without a vote in Congress. That gives Aponte, a campaign contributor aligned to the immigration lobby, access to top-secret information as a political reward. But Aponte's past is one big red flag. From 1982...

SPIES WHO LOOK JUST LIKE US: THE GAME THAT IS NOT A GAME SNIPPET: "The basic task of all spies, including the SVR Russian operatives recently caught, is to "steal and shape," Simmons explained. The "steal" aspect is best known to the public, that is, stealing another nation's military or production secrets, but Simmons also described how spies can "shape" a nation. Spies engaged in the "shape" aspect of espionage are known as "agents of influence," Simmons said. These "agents of influence" attempt to mold the thinking of a society or a government by targeting "experts who are quoted in...

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,...

Bush defeatism? Conservative national security officials are wondering what is going wrong inside the Bush White House. The choice of a retired Marine Corps general known for his liberal political views as a candidate for a "czar" over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has many scratching their heads and wondering whether the president is aligning his administration with the defeatists now opposing the war. The retired Marine in question is Gen. Jack Sheehan, who was asked to be the new coordinator, despite a reputation as a liberal military officer, something uncharacteristic of most Marines. He turned it down, not...

WASHINGTON - Sen. Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., led congressional efforts in the mid-1990s that handcuffed the CIA's abilities to recruit spies - a key policy that helped allow the attacks of Sept. 11 to take place with no intelligence warnings. Current and former CIA operatives say that Clinton administration policies, which forbade the CIA from recruiting known terrorists and other criminals, left the U.S. government bereft of all intelligence about such terrorist groups. In 1995, then-Rep. Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., made secrets public at the behest of left-wing activist Bianca Jagger, his girlfriend at the time, according to Newark Star-Ledger columnist Paul...