This is the moment of the release of the queen of Cuba.
Ana Belén Montes is known by this nickname, now 65 years old, who this weekend left the Forth Worth (Texas) prison after serving almost two decades of sentence as a spy for the Cuban regime.
Montes cannot be considered just any spy. His was vocational.
If he decided to collaborate with the enemy, he did not do it for money, for greed and wealth. No. He acted out of ideology. His had been since he was in college. In 1984, at the height of the Ronald Reagan government, she was working in an office job at the Department of Justice in Washington, while she was studying for a master’s degree at Johns Hopkins.
An American citizen of Puerto Rican descent, she often participated in demonstrations against the policies of Reagan – seen at the time as a radical Republican whom Donald Trump has turned into a blessed one – who launched a crusade against Central American countries that had leftist executives.
“I thought that the United States did not have the right to impose its will on other countries,” Special Agent Pete Lapp, who actually led the investigation that led to Montes’s arrest, told CNN on September 21, 2001. after the 9/11 attacks and shortly before the US invaded Afghanistan. She had already had access to those military attack plans.
He was sentenced to 25 years in jail in 2002 after pleading guilty to conspiracy and leaking information, including the names of four US spies, as well as other highly classified material to Havana.
In those days as a student, her fury against Reagan’s foreign policy caused problems in her relationships and, in turn, attracted the attention of Havana, which turned to her to urge her to turn her back on friends, family and, ultimately, to his country. A fellow student at Johns Hopkins learned of Montes’ impassioned comments about Cuba and put her in contact with Castro recruiters at a dinner in New York. He agreed to lend his collaboration.
In parallel, he applied for a job at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), where employees handle US military secrets on a daily basis.
Despite her reputation as a “revolutionary” and her criticism of the Reagan administration, she had no problem accessing the DIA as an analyst.
When she joined that agency in 1985, Montes had already traveled to the island for her training and was fully involved in Cuban espionage, according to the FBI. It took a short time for her to rise through the ranks and become the DIA’s leading Cuba expert.
At trial, the Prosecutor’s Office maintained that Montes received coded messages via shortwave radio, such as series of numbers, which he typed on a laptop equipped with a decryptor to translate them into text.
Montes argued, during his sentencing hearing, that he acted in obedience to his conscience and that the US policy towards Cuba was cruel and unfair. “I felt morally obligated to help the island in its own defense against the efforts of our political system,” he stressed at the hearing.
He had spent more than 15 years leaking secrets to Havana every few weeks.
She had her first notice in 1996, when she was called to consult at the Pentagon because of an international incident. There had been suspicions for some time that there was a spy working for Fidel Castro in the DIA. The FBI was on her trail.
That suspect traveled to the US Guantanamo base on the island at a specific time. Reviewing the records revealed the identity of Montes. They knew immediately that she was the mole, said Scott Carmichael, a counterintelligence agent at the DIA.
Carmichael and Lapp teamed up to prove that the Queen of Cuba was the traitor. They managed to link sensitive information with a computer model used by her. The FBI agent recalled Montes’s stoicism when she was arrested, as if she were something of fate.
The judge established in the release order that Montes must be placed under supervision for five years, with her internet access monitored and with the prohibition of working for foreign governments or companies.
“That part of his life is already closed,” Lapp insisted, “I can’t imagine putting his freedom at risk.”
