22 Facts About Ana Montes

Ana Belen Montes was born on February 28,1957 and is a former American senior analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency in the United States who spied on behalf of the Cuban government for 17 years.

Ana Montes pleaded guilty to spying and, in October 2002, was sentenced to a 25-year prison term to be followed by five-years' probation.

Ana Montes was released on January 6,2023, after having served 20 years behind bars.

Ana Montes was born in Nuremberg, West Germany, where her father, Alberto Ana Montes, was posted as a US Army doctor.

Ana Montes's family originated from the Asturian region of Spain, and her grandparents immigrated to Puerto Rico.

Ana Montes's former boyfriend, Roger Corneretto, was an intelligence officer specializing in Cuba for the Pentagon.

Ana Montes joined the Defense Intelligence Agency in September 1985 after having worked for the United States Department of Justice.

In 1992, Montes was selected for the DIA's Exceptional Analyst Program, and she later traveled to Cuba to study the Cuban military.

Ana Montes's co-workers regarded her as responsible and dependable, and they noted her "no-nonsense" attitude.

Prosecutors later would allege that Ana Montes already was working for the Cubans when she joined the DIA in 1985.

Ana Montes was recruited by Cuban intelligence while she was a student at Johns Hopkins University in the 1980s.

Ana Montes became known to other students for her strong opinions in support of left-wing Latin American movements like the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua.

Ana Montes communicated with the Cuban Intelligence Service through encrypted messages and received her instructions through shortwave encrypted transmissions from Cuba.

In 2007, American DIA counterintelligence official Scott W Carmichael publicly alleged that it was Ana Montes who told Cuban intelligence officers about a clandestine US Army camp in El Salvador.

Carmichael alleged that Ana Montes knew about the existence of the Special Forces camp because she visited it only a few weeks before the camp was attacked in 1987 by Cuban-supported guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front.

Carmichael characterized the damage that Ana Montes caused to the DIA and other US intelligence agencies as "exceptionally grave," and stated that she compromised a "special-access program" that was kept secret even from him, the lead investigator on her case.

In 2004, a federal indictment alleged that Ana Montes was assisted by another Cuban agent, Marta Rita Velazquez, who was a legal officer at the United States Agency for International Development and was further alleged to have recruited Ana Montes into espionage.

Ana Montes was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation at her office on September 21,2001.

Prosecutors stated that Ana Montes was privy to classified information about the US military's impending invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 and that they did not want her revealing this information to potential enemies.

At the sentencing hearing, Ana Montes described US policy towards Cuba as cruel and unfair and said "I felt morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it".

Ana Montes was incarcerated at Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas.

Ana Montes is currently living in Puerto Rico and continues to speak out against US sanctions against Cuba.