HAVANA LIES
HAVANA LIES
How the Cubans Put a Spy Within the American Government
The fictional world of espionage will often depict James
Bond or Jason Bourne fighting off a gang of hulking goons before scaling a
skyscraper and then driving a sports car off a bridge – their downtime will consist
of lavish drinks and beautiful women.
The reality is something far more subversive and far more mundane.
Real-life spying requires a patience and slow exacting nature that is far
removed from explosions and fist fights. Spying after all is a dirty trade of dirty
lies and dirty secrets, Bond creator Ian Fleming said so himself.
This is the story of Ana Montes; a mild-mannered, shy and
retiring intelligence analyst working tirelessly for the American government. It
would take a long time before anybody cottoned on to the fact that Ana lived a
secret life as a Cuban double agent. Ana had access to the most sensitive of
data in American military and shared them with her Cuban cohorts.
Ana seemed like the perfect American on paper – she was even
an army brat. She was born in West Germany to a United States Army doctor. She was
educated at the University of Virginia and then obtained her masters at John
Hopkins. Ana was a bright, intelligent and seemingly patriotic American, the
mind boggles at how somebody so ordinary could even become a double agent for a
hostile foreign nation and how a top intelligence analyst within the American
government managed to live on a pyramid of lies. Beyond the lies and secrets
that Ana kept while in the office; Ana also had a quiet private life that her
colleagues barely knew about. She was totally conspicuous, the way a double
agent should be.
The damage that Ana did to her home nation wasn’t just in
telling harmless office tales. Things are never that easy…
Ana knowingly put American troops and civilians into harm’s
way until her arrest in 2001 and it is impossible to know the full extent of how
much damage she caused but lives were lost from Ana’s dirty work.
Cuba are not a great military threat to the United States
(in terms of sheer military force) and it is hard to really imagine the
potential physical damage that Cuba could do to their giant neighbours. Instead;
Cuba are the best in the world at selling secrets. They’ve made a niche out of
selling US military secrets to other nations such as China, Russia, Iran and
North Korea. And this is how the Cuban government try to combat their enemy. While
Cuba often look like the smaller beguiled nation living just outside of
America’s shadow. They operate with their own cunning and ingenuity. Fidel
Castro was after all a genius at politics.
The Cuban Intelligence Directorate, commonly known as G2,
were initially trained by the KGB upon their foundation and throughout their 40-year
history they have operated in Chile, Grenada, Nicaragua and Vietnam but surely
their greatest ever coup was putting an agent deep in the American DIA (Defense
Intelligence Agency).
Montes’ recruitment into the G2 and her relationship with
Cuba evolved out of Montes’ anger at US foreign policy while still a student
earning her degree in foreign relations. Her ire at American foreign policy
drew the attention of talent-spotting Cubans and they sought to recruit Ana,
this was all the way back in the mid-1980s before she even got a job in
government. Montes’ anger was likely a result of her Puerto Rican ancestry and
the feelings against America’s constant intervention in Latin America.
Just after her recruitment Ana applied for a job within the DIA in a clerical functions. This meant that Ana would handle matters of defense and the most classified military secrets.
Ana was an award-winning member of the DIA; one of the core reasons Ana was never caught for so long was the fact that she never took any documents to her home and worked with a tenacity and ambition within the office that sought admirers instead of enemies. Ana memorised all of the information she got her hands on and would later type them up on her personal laptop. She would then transfer the information onto encrypted messages for her Cuban handlers. Ana received all of her own instructions by the Cuban handlers on a short-wave radio. Montes tenaciously managed her double life. A rising start in both Washington and Havana – with Fidel himself having been aware of Montes – she was a prefect analyst by day and at night she was frantically typing up the memorised messages to Havana.
During this period of intense spying, the quiet, resolute and ambitious Ana managed to rise through the ranks of the DIA.
Ana was considered a model employee and would often be given
as an example to follow for new starters at the agency; Ana eventually became
the Cuban-expert (nicknamed the Queen of Cuba) within the DIA and dealt intensely
with Cuban affairs. The only suspicion that her colleagues had on her were the potentially
more ‘left leaning’ political beliefs that Ana held, however even with this,
Ana managed to pass a polygraph during a round of questioning and keep under
the radar for almost twenty years.
The most incredible thing about Ana’s activity was that she was not even paid for taking such risks, the motives being solely politically motivated. This is in contrast to other agents that were paid in the millions for selling secrets – greedy double agents such as Aldrich Ames, that took home sacks of cash.
How Was the Spy Caught?
The DIA had strong beliefs that there was a Cuban mole in
their midst. In 1996 the Cuban military shot down a plane piloted by BROTHERS
TO THE RESCUE, a Cuban resistance organisation based in America. The
Americans claimed that this was an act of aggression against a civilian plane
with the Cubans stating the opposite. This incident alerted suspicions into how
the Cuban government were so prepared for the plane before the shooting and if they
had been tipped-off. Questions were raised into the possibility of a double
agent.
While called to consult at an internal meeting at the
Pentagon after this incident, Montes broke protocol by failing to remain on
duty until dismissed. This raised suspicion within the agency. Scott Carmichael
was an investigator that took an immediate reaction to Ana and soon others were
alerted.
Was her sparkling record just too good to be true? What
about the trips Ana made to Guantanamo Bay? Why was Ana always so willing to go
to Cuba?
Counterintelligence officer Scott Carmichael said, after
meeting Ana and carrying out a search for all DIA employees and potential moles:
“The moment I saw her name, I knew.”
The gut-reaction that any intelligence agent will tell you
overwhelms the facts and evidence and proof they may have at the time; the
instincts you hone over years and years of talking to people – you just know.
Carmichael was positive he had his woman after profiling Ana.
The FBI soon joined forces with the DIA to actually catch Montes in the act of spying. The two agencies tapped her phones, staked her out, they followed Ana intensely and they noticed her patterns… for four years.
They found the payphones around Washington D.C where Ana was
stopping to make calls and traced the numbers to pagers in New York which were linked
to suspected Cuban agents.
The most ingenious sting of all was to set up an urgent meeting at work with Ana during which they could access and search her purse (which she left at her desk). It was inside her purse that they found encrypted notes that Montes was passing to her handlers. From 1985 until 2001 Ana Montes had managed to live a double life of working in the higher echelons of national defense and for the Cuban government at the same time. Ana Montes was arrested just ten days after 9/11.
So how much damage did Ana cause?
It is impossible to really know the full extent of Ana’s
spying and in sixteen years you can never find out all of the state secrets
that she managed to sell. Perhaps Ana doesn’t even know herself.
Ana made a plea bargain in avoidance of the death penalty in
a plea agreement with the prosecutors and was then debriefed by the US
Government, but despite this it is impossible to know just how much she gave
away to an enemy state. Carmichael believes that Montes’ secret sharing lead
directly to the death of an American soldier operating in El Salvador in March
of 1987. Montes had only recently visited El Salvador that year and knew the
precise location of the camp where Special Forces were operating before being
attacked by rebel forces.
Once the gig was up, the Cuban government washed their hands
of the agent and left her out to dry. Ana was subsequently sentenced to 25
years in prison, a lenient sentence for high treason. Ana may very well be a
free woman by 2027. This is subject to five years-probation.
Ana’s own lawyer Plato Cacheris said the espionage was a
moral crusade against the evils of American imperialism. Ana felt so strongly
that the Cubans were subject to American strong-arming for too long. Being a Puerto
Rican it is arguable that the imperialism against her own nation may have lit
the fuse of revolt.
The fact that somebody who was working completely under the
radar of any investigators for such a long time and can climb to the highest
ranks of the US defense is an eye opener for anybody that works in state
security.
Ana maintained a double-life and worked with a Joan of Arc-like commitment that went far beyond money and greed. The mystery remains as to how many other operatives are now (as of the time of writing) selling the secrets that keep Americans (or any other nation) safe…
After all Ana Montes wasn’t even the most famous Ana to be
caught spying against America. There would later be the Russian spy Anna
Chapman, caught nearly 10-years later in a major Russian spy ring.
It is often the case in geopolitics - the enemies walk amongst
us.
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