Espionage
In their charging documents, federal prosecutors stated:
"Montes communicated with the Cuban Intelligence Service through encrypted messages and received her instructions through shortwave encrypted transmissions from Cuba. In addition, Montes communicated by coded numeric pager messages with the Cuban Intelligence Service by public telephones located in the District of Columbia and Maryland. The codes included 'I received message' or 'danger.'"
The prosecutors further stated that all of the information was on water-soluble paper that could be rapidly destroyed.
During the course of the investigation against her, it was determined that Montes passed a considerable amount of classified information to Cuba's government, including the identities of four spies. In 2007, DIA counterintelligence official Scott W. Carmichael publicly alleged that it was Ana Montes who told Cuban intelligence officers about a clandestine U.S. Army camp in El Salvador. Carmichael alleged that 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 FMLN.
Carmichael, who had led DIA's investigation of Montes, named Montes as being directly responsible for the death of Green Beret SGT Gregory A. Fronius who was killed at El Paraiso, El Salvador, on March 31, 1987 during the FMLN attack. Carmichael characterized the damage Montes caused to the DIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies as "exceptionally grave," and stated that she compromised a "special access program" that was kept even from him, the lead investigator on her case.
In a May 6, 2002 interview with CBS News, former Undersecretary of State John Bolton stated that an official 1998 U.S. government report with significant contributions by Montes concluded that Cuba did not represent a significant military threat to the United States or the region. Bolton alleged that it was not possible to exclude the possibility that the administration of President Bill Clinton may have overlooked Cuba as a potential threat because of Montes' influence and the way she shaped reporting at DIA.
Carmichael further alleged that many in the U.S. intelligence community believed that Montes' penetration of the DIA was not the exception, but the rule, and that the Cuban intelligence services had numerous spies and moles within U.S. intelligence agencies.
Read more about this topic: Ana Montes
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