U.S. citizen Ana Belén Montes was released last Friday after more than 20 years in prison for spying for Cuba. Montes worked as an analyst for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), but was handing over secrets to Cuban authorities.
A spokesman for the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons, Scott Taylor, reported Montes’ release on Saturday, according to Puerto Rican media. Montes was being held at the Fort Worth prison in Texas and is 65 years old.
Montes, who began working for the DIA in 1985, was arrested in 2001 by FBI agents shortly after the 9/11 attacks after being charged with espionage for revealing secret U.S. military plans to Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
Montes went so far as to collect coded messages by shortwave radio, leak encrypted files and even impersonate someone else with a wig and a fake passport, among other anecdotes of her long career. She was considered a top-level expert on the Cuban Armed Forces.
The leaking of information by the Puerto Rican, known as the ‘Queen of Cuba’, even led to the death of a U.S. Special Forces officer in El Salvador, as reported in December by the CBS network.
Montes traveled up to four times to Cuba for meetings with intelligence agents and received numerous cash checks and even a certificate of distinction that the then director of the CIA, George Tenet, gave her in 1997, according to the newspaper ‘The Washington Post’.
In the criminal proceedings she admitted having revealed to the Cuban authorities the identity of four U.S. undercover agents and faced a possible death sentence if convicted, but reached an agreement with the prosecution to serve 25 years in prison.
«I participated in the activity that brings me before you because I obeyed my conscience rather than the law,» she testified during the trial. «I believe that our government’s policy toward Cuba is cruel and unjust, and contradictory to the good neighbor ideal, and I felt compelled to help the island defend itself against efforts to impose our values and political system on it,» she added.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
