Ana Belen Montes (28 February 1957-) was an American Defense Intelligence Agency senior analyst who, on 21 September 2001, was arrested after it was discovered that she had been spying on the United States government for the Cuban government of Fidel Castro.
Biography[]
Ana Belen Montes was born in Marseille, France on 28 February 1957 to a family of Puerto Rican and Asturian descent. She was raised in Topeka, Kansas and Towson, Maryland, and she became a leftist activist during her studies at Johns Hopkins University during the 1980s, tirelessly supporting Latin America's socialist governments; she was later approached and recruited by an agent of the Cuban agent. At the behest of her communist handlers, Montes joined the DIA in September 1985 after a spell with the Department of Justice, and she sent encrypted messages to the Cuban government on water-soluble paper and via payphones in Washington DC. She revealed the identities of four US spies in Cuba, helped the FMLN attack a secret Green Berets camp in El Salvador on 31 March 1987 (leading to the death of an American special forces operative Gregory A. Fronius), and allegedly convinced President Bill Clinton that the Cuban government posed no threat to the United States via her reports. During the 1990s, she was investigated by DIA counterintelligence, and she was arrested by the FBI on 21 September 2001 before she could leak information on the impending invasion of Afghanistan to the Cubans. In October 2002, she pled guilty to espionage, claiming that her actions were due to the United States' "intolerance and contempt" towards Cuba, and she was sentenced to 25 years in prison.