The double agent for Cuba at the Pentagon’s top intelligence agency was arrested 21 years ago and was due to be released in the early days of 2023.
On September 21, 2001, the Queen of Cuba, as she was known by the secret services, was arrested. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents broke into analyst Ana Belén Montes’ office at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) facilities at Bolling Air Base in Washington, DC. The arrest took place at exactly 11 a.m.
He is credited with 22 years of service at the DIA, 17 of which were spent passing information to the Cuban regime. Quite a few therefore considered her to be Fidel Castro’s personal agent.
In October 2002, she was sentenced to 25 years or 300 months in prison for conspiracy to commit espionage for the Cuban regime. In Miami, federal judge Alberto Milián has thoroughly investigated the trial of Belén Montes, who would have served 20 years in prison when she was released in January.
“Honestly, he deserved life imprisonment or the death penalty because that’s what a person who commits such treason in the United States deserves,” said Milián, who rose to the rank of military counterintelligence captain in the US Army.
Belén Montes pleaded guilty to no jury trial and, according to Milián, is responsible for the death of a US special forces soldier who was providing military advice in El Salvador. It was in 1987 that guerrillas attacked a Salvadoran army camp, causing several casualties.
“She gave this information (the location of the camp) to Fidel Castro, his teacher. In many cases of espionage, settlements are reached, first because the traitor cooperates and passes on the reports that he passed on to the enemy, which is why he may not have been sentenced to death,” said Milián, who has no hesitation in assuring Belén Montes caused a lot of damage to the country.
He also recalled the cases of Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent, or Aldrich Ames, a CIA officer, who were sentenced to life imprisonment and “will die in prison thanks to justice,” said the former prosecutor.
Belén Montes not only betrayed her country, but also her sister and brother who worked for the FBI.
“The self-love was stronger than her. Allegedly because he was narcissistic, he took pride in serving Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution. How ironic!” Milián lamented.
At trial, prosecutors presented overwhelming evidence, a shortwave radio and the numeric codes they used to transmit the information, and not just that it was about Cuba.
“As the United States planned its response to the Taliban and al-Qaeda for the September 9, 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, authorities feared that Belén Montes would leak this information to Castro, among other things, Cuba profiting from intelligence work and selling information to North Korea, to Iran, to all enemies of democracy, so the FBI probably had reason to justify his arrest at the time,” he recalled.
The Queen of Cuba was arrested 9 days after the attacks on the Twin Towers (“The World Trade Center”). In his case, the hearings were public and he had legal representation from veteran lawyer Plato Cacheris, who died in 2019.
“He pleaded guilty, he showed contempt for the court because he said up to the last moment that he did it because of the injustice that the United States had done in Latin America and knew his psychology and studied his record in depth, I can.” say that he is a very confident person; this is what the secret services of the former Soviet Union, the KGB, the services of Putin and Fidel Castro were looking for.”
Castro was never interested in exchanging his alleged personal spy because, as far as is known, she was not an agent, she was not an officer of the Castro Intelligence Directorate like the five spies of the Wasp Network.
“Ana Belén Montes was a very useful informant for Cuba, but not for the people. Moreover, the damage inflicted on the United States was so severe that the DIA and CIA flatly opposed the exchange,” commented Milián.
Belén Montes is being held at Carswell Federal Prison and Women’s Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas with prisoner number 25037-016.
The facility has inmates of all security levels with medical needs and mental health issues. Family sources said the spy was suffering from breast cancer.
In Puerto Rico and in several cities in the United States, Latin America and Europe, there are groups that promote their freedom and deem their imprisonment unjust, such as Ana Belén Montes’ La Mesa de Trabajo and Ana Belén’s Cuba.
“We’re not doing any interviews at the moment,” Miriam Montes-Mock, a paternal cousin who lives in Puerto Rico, told Radio Televisión Martí.
These days, former FBI agent Peter Lapp, one of the agents who arrested Belén Montes, is in Miami promoting his book Queen of Cuba, which will go on sale after the spy’s release in January. He will be joined on the tour by co-writer and journalist Kelly Kennedy and Chris Simmons, the former DIA analyst and colonel who helped interrogate the informant.
Once the charges are paid, Ana Belén Montes has the right to social reintegration, the procedure to promote the integration of a person convicted of violating the penal code.
“I hope he will live in Cuba. I wouldn’t want her in the United States, I wouldn’t want to share with a traitor the freedom and oxygen we enjoy. If there’s a special place in hell, it’s for people like her,” judge Alberto Milían concluded.