She is American, of Puerto Rican descent, Cuban at heart, and in the midst of the 9/11 drama, Americans discovered that she was also one of the greatest spies of all time. Sentenced to 25 years in the maximum security women’s prison in Carswell, Texas, Ana Belén Montes, now 65, is freed for good behavior three years before the end of her sentence.
“Ana Belén was an exceptional agent, not just a spy. She operated with impunity for 16 years and became the US government’s top intelligence analyst for Cuba while reporting to the Cuban government,” summarizes Scott Carmichael, a former counterintelligence agent for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), in the book Inside the Investigation and Capture of Ana Montes” (free translation, no Portuguese version), published by the US Naval Institute Press.
When Belén was discovered, there was a shock in the intelligence community. According to Carmichael, she not only transmitted information about the United States to Cuba, but also influenced the way American services perceived the communist island. So when Bill Clinton declared in 1998 that “Cuba no longer poses a threat to the United States,” Ana Belén contributed to this movement.
Among the privileged information leaked to the Cubans in 1987, the spy provided the coordinates of a secret US special forces camp in El Salvador. There, Marxist guerrillas liquidated 90 people. Years later, on the eve of his arrest, Belén would have transmitted the United States’ plans for the invasion of Afghanistan.
In addition to using the information gathered by Belén, Havana shared the revelations with its allies Iran, Venezuela and Russia.
The girl who hated the US military
The daughter of a US Army psychiatrist, Ana was born in 1957 at a US Army base in Nuremberg, Germany. The Puerto Rican family moved to Kansas and then settled in Maryland near Baltimore.
Ana’s father beat her mother, two younger brothers and a sister until her parents divorced when she was 15. Undercover agent Montes reportedly developed a hatred for the US military, which she associated with her father.
In his youth, Belén met a young Argentinian leftist during a university exchange in Spain and embraced leftist ideas while at the same time harshly criticizing the policies of Ronald Reagan.
Ana was hired by the US Department of Justice in the early 1980s and earned a master’s degree in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University. A few years later she was recruited by the FBI.
She joined the DIA in 1985, visited Cuba that same year, rose through the ranks of the US government, and in 1992 became the first female political and military analyst on Cuban affairs to be dubbed the “Queen of Cuba.”
Ana said during her 2002 trial, “I obeyed my conscience more than the law. I consider our government’s policy towards Cuba to be cruel and unfair.” According to her biography, she wrote to a nephew from prison: “I owe allegiance to principle and to no country, government or person. United States, not Cuba, not Obama, not the Castro brothers, not even God.”