By Lorenzo Castro E.
MIAMI – Ana Belén Montes, known as the “Queen of Cuba” and noted as one of the most damaging spies in US history, will be released after spending more than 20 years in prison for sending classified information to the authorities Cubans for 17 years and while working in the US intelligence service.
“The damage is incredibly extensive,” Peter Lapp, a former FBI agent and one of his captors, told EFE on September 21, 2001, when Montes left the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) facilities in Washington in handcuffs. after being discovered as an informant for the then president of Cuba, Fidel Castro.
Every day, this daughter of Puerto Rican parents and who had two brothers who worked in the FBI, sat at her desk with the goal of memorizing the three most important things of the day, which she later transmitted to a network of nine Cuban spies, seven of them located in the US and the other two in Havana.
The DIA senior analyst and top expert on Cuban military affairs even went so far as to pass on information about a secret program of the US government’s National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) based on the use of satellites and that was related to with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
In Lapp’s words, that information from satellites was the “most damaging it gave, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
The information was so sensitive that in the event of a trial it could not have been used by prosecutors, otherwise the sentence would have been greater than the 25 years in prison he received after pleading guilty in 2002.
Ana Belén Montes will be released this Friday from a maximum security federal prison for women in Fort Worth (Texas).
The sympathizer of the Latin American left
During the 1980s, Montes was a master’s student at Johns Hopkins University and is remembered by some of her classmates as a fervent supporter of left-wing movements in Latin America, a stance that drew the attention of a Cuban intelligence agent. who recruited her.
In 1985, shortly after the first of a series of trips to Cuba, she was selected for a position in the DIA, to which she applied convinced by the then-called Cuban General Directorate of Intelligence (DGI).
From the US government agency, Montes transmitted, in the form of encrypted messages or in meetings that could be in broad daylight, classified information that, as Lapp points out, cannot be measured by volume but by quality, as is the case with the identity of four US spies in Cuba.
Throughout all those years, his motivations were always based on a deep “anti-American” feeling and the conviction that his activity helped the Cuban people.
“They are very good at recruiting individuals like Montes, like-minded, compassionate people who don’t do it for money,” Lapp says of the Cuban intelligence apparatus, in his opinion one of the best in the world and which no doubt currently has undercover agents. within the US Government
“You are not really helping the people of Cuba if you help the Cuban government. You are helping a corrupt, murderous, oppressive and authoritarian regime. Period, ”adds the former agent, who this year will publish“ Queen of Cuba ”, a book that details the details of the investigation that he gave with her capture.