A few days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, Ana
Belen Montes, a top Defense Department intelligence analyst, sent an e-mail
note to an old friend saying she was all right and had not known anyone who
died at the Pentagon.
"I could see the Pentagon burning from my office," she wrote. "Nonetheless,
it pales next to the World Trade Center. Dark days ahead. So much hate and
self-righteousness."
The days darkened quickly for Ms. Montes. A week later, federal agents
charged her with spying for Cuba. She is the highest-ranking official ever
accused of espionage at the Defense Intelligence Agency, which, as a sister
agency to the C.I.A., handles analysis for the Pentagon.
The arrest, on Sept. 21, left her friends and colleagues at a loss to
explain what might have motivated her to risk everything, should the charges
prove true. Friends described Ms. Montes, who is 44 and single, as a loyal
companion, a doting aunt and an avid traveler. She had no evident money
problems, and was apparently content dating a man who either was in the
military or did business at the Pentagon, they said.
She was warm and funny, friends said, and seemed apolitical, even back in
college.
"I can't picture her being involved in something like this," said Lisa A.
Huber of Louisville, Ky., who attended the University of Virginia with Ms.
Montes and received the e-mail message. "It goes against everything I know
about her. She has a lot of integrity."
Ms. Montes, the D.I.A.'s top intelligence analyst for Cuba since 1992, left
a different impression among colleagues. She came off as rather severe, they
said; at meetings, she sat rigidly and rarely spoke.
"She was a very strange person, very standoffish, extraordinarily shy," an
American diplomat said.
But professionally, Ms. Montes seemed above reproach. She spoke fluent
Spanish, and in 1990 she was tapped to brief Nicaragua's new president,
Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, about the Cuban-backed Sandinista military.
In 1992 or 1993, she pulled off what seemed to be an intelligence coup. She
traveled to Cuba and interviewed Cuban generals about economic reforms. In
1998, she helped draft a widely cited analysis that found that Cuba's much
diminished military posed no strategic threat. Last week, she briefed top
Pentagon policy makers on Cuba.
Despite her immersion in Cuba issues, virtually no one in the Cuba policy
community — two dozen officials, academics, nongovernmental advocates and
Congressional aides — recalls her venturing an opinion on American policy
toward Havana.
The F.B.I. affidavit said Ms. Montes, who had a high-level security
clearance, spied for Cuba for at least five years. She identified at least
one American undercover agent to the Cubans, disclosed a top secret
intelligence-gathering program and reported on American training in the
Caribbean, the F.B.I. said.
Current and former American officials say she was in a position to tell
Havana virtually everything the intelligence community knew about Cuba's
military and might even have disclosed American contingency plans for taking
the island by force.
"I would think, if damage was done, it would be about what she learned about
the U.S., how it was militarily prepared vis-ŕ-vis Cuba," said Richard
Nuccio, President Bill Clinton's special adviser on Cuba.
Alberto R. Coll, a top Pentagon official in the first Bush administration,
said that the damage could be multiplied if Cuba shared stolen intelligence
with other governments hostile to the United States. Ms. Montes had access
to a daily synopsis of American intelligence worldwide.
If the Havana government "wanted to earn points with the Chinese, maybe
Iraq, Iran, Libya, it would not be surprising," said Dr. Coll, now dean of
the Naval War College in Rhode Island. "Cuba has political ties with all
those countries."
Intelligence officials said they had no evidence of such sharing. But some
analysts said the prospect might have compelled the authorities to arrest
Ms. Montes within 10 days of the attacks. She had been under F.B.I.
surveillance since May.
According to the F.B.I., Ms. Montes received numeric messages from Cuba by
shortwave radio, which she decoded on her home computer, and replied in code
by telephoning a pager number from pay phones.
The authorities have declined to say how they came to suspect Ms. Montes.
Ms. Montes's detention hearing at Federal District Court in Washington is
scheduled for Oct. 4. Tony Miles, her public defender, did not respond to
requests for an interview.
