She led two lives -- dutiful analyst, and spy for Cuba
BY TIM JOHNSON
tjohnson@herald.com. Courtesy of the Miami Herald

SEEMED RELIABLE: Ana Montes, by then a spy for Cuba, appears at a 1987 office party of the Defense Intelligence Agency, where she worked as an analyst.

PARKVILLE, Md. - In a brief e-mail message laden with emotion, the mother of Ana Belen Montes -- a top spy for Cuba -- lays bare the anguish she feels over her daughter's plight.

''We do not agree with what Ana did but I still love her very much,'' Emilia B. Montes wrote to a reporter. ``She was my first born, a very good daughter who never gave me any heartaches until now. She is still a good, smart and loving person. She had the best intentions, [but] just went about it the wrong way.''

Exactly how Ana Montes went the ''wrong way'' is not obvious at first glance, a worrisome phenomenon at a time when investigators are searching for telltale signs of alienation in order to spot potential terrorists.

Indeed, Montes appears to have enjoyed an all-American upbringing. But a more probing look reveals the contours of an emotional makeup that may have led her to betray her country -- and even her family -- to become the most important known spy for Cuba to penetrate the U.S. intelligence apparatus.

Meticulous and trim, the 45-year-old Montes seemed the antithesis of a rebel. She had climbed a career ladder at the super-secret Defense Intelligence Agency, becoming the most senior analyst on Cuba. She carefully saved her substantial salary, kept her apartment neat, went to the gym almost daily and kept to routine. She refrained from gossip, even with her most loyal friends. If anyone seemed safe and reliable, it was Ana Montes.

But somewhere along the way, Montes entered a labyrinth of mirrors where deceit and reality intermingle. When she emerged, even her own family did not recognize her.

''I'm still flabbergasted,'' her mother said in a brief telephone conversation, talking with more than a little reticence. ``We waited and waited to find out it wasn't true.''

No such luck. In March, Montes confessed in U.S. District Court to one count of conspiracy to commit espionage. She had become a crown jewel for the Cuban intelligence service, one of the most effective in the world. Experts say she spilled a flood of secrets to her Cuban handlers.

''They wanted everything. They just sucked everything out of her,'' said one security official knowledgeable about the case. ``[Fidel] Castro trades in this kind of information.''

A LIFE OF PERIL

Clandestine activities belied no-risk demeanor

Close friends were stricken. They discovered that Ana Montes, who seemed to shun risk, led a life of enormous peril. She rose at odd hours to listen to high-frequency coded messages from Havana. She trooped from one pay phone to another to send beeper messages. And she disappeared on exotic vacations -- often alone.

''Her family is devastated, her reputation is ruined, and her money and all that is gone,'' said an old friend, who insisted on anonymity.

It is no ordinary family. Montes has a brother who works for the FBI in the Atlanta area and a sister who is a translator for the FBI in South Florida. The sister helped bring down a large Cuban spy ring, the so-called Wasp Network, last year.

Montes is now held in a secret location, where debriefers are assessing the damage she caused. The Justice Department says Montes began working for Cuban intelligence by 1985. They now know whether she was a ''walk-in'' who offered her services, or whether she was recruited or blackmailed to work for Havana. But they are not sharing what they know.

And they won't reveal it until Montes appears in September for sentencing. It is then that a judge will hand her a 25-year term, and five additional years of parole, if federal officials attest that she has cooperated fully.

NO SIGN OF ENRICHMENT

Motivation seemed to come from ideology and emotion

By all indications, Montes did not receive a penny for her betrayal. She worked for Havana out of ideological conviction, dismay at U.S. policy, and perhaps an amalgam of emotions sown in adolescence along the leafy streets of this northern Baltimore suburb.

It is here that Montes began to battle most strongly with her father, Alberto L. Montes, a Freudian psychoanalyst who dealt sternly with his four children and tried to inculcate his conservative values in them.

''He was a very strict disciplinarian,'' recalled Emilia Montes, who later divorced her husband. ``When I was young, people used to say that the children of psychiatrists have problems. They clashed. He was strong-willed, very much like her.''

Dr. Montes, who was born in Puerto Rico in 1928, went to medical school in upstate New York, then joined the Army in 1956, going first to West Germany, where Ana was born, then moving with his family to Topeka, Kan., for seven years. He specialized in adult psychiatry at the respected Menninger Clinic.

By the time the Montes family moved to the Baltimore suburbs in 1967, the father had quit the Army and the family appeared to live the American Dream. Dr. Montes earned a large income in private practice, the family lived on a cul-de-sac in an upper middle-class neighborhood, and the children attended top-notch public schools.

''Dr. Montes was a good psychiatrist, very well regarded in the community,'' said a fellow psychiatrist, Jaime Lievano, who still lives in Baltimore. ``He had specific training in Freudian analysis.''

The family clung to its Puerto Rican roots, even as Ana Montes and her younger sister and two younger brothers stood out at the local Loch Raven High School for their Hispanic heritage.

''Look at the faces,'' Principal G. Keith Harmeyer said as he flipped through the school yearbook for 1975, when Ana Montes graduated. Only two other students had Hispanic surnames.

Next to her senior photo, Ana Montes noted that her favorite things were ``summer, beaches, soccer, Stevie W., P.R., chocolate chip cookies, having a good time with fun people.''

While Dr. Montes kept his psychiatric practice at a local clinic, his wife developed her own career as an investigator for a federal employment anti-discrimination office, and grew active in Hispanic community affairs.

It is there that Emilia Montes had a serious run-in with Cuban exiles.

''The Cubans and I had our encounters. They don't fight clean,'' she said, speaking with a candor that appears to be part of her feisty nature.

A SPAT WITH EXILES

Mother was involved in immigrant activism

Even today, Hispanic community activists remember the spat in the mid-1970s, when Emilia Montes led a federation of Hispanic immigrants from all over Latin America in a quest for a slot in a Showcase of Nations city festival. A rival group of well-connected Cuban exiles said that it should win the slot.

``Emilia Montes said, `This is not true. The Cubans don't represent everybody. We've got more than just Cubans around here' , said Javier Bustamante, a fellow activist.

''They had a knock-down, drag-out fight,'' added Bustamante, who is from Spain.

Backed by the umbrella Federation of Hispanic Organizations, and speaking on her local radio program, Emilia Montes succeeded in defeating the Cuban exile group.

''She was out for the little guy,'' recalled Jose Ruiz, who is a city liaison with the Hispanic community. Chuckling, he added: ``She was a character. She had her moments.''

By 1977, when Ana Montes had left the family home and was attending the University of Virginia, the parents fell into an acrimonious divorce and custody battle for the two youngest children, Alberto M. and Juan Carlos.

The court awarded Mrs. Montes custody of the two sons, the family home and a 1974 Plymouth, and a small alimony.

If Ana Montes ever mended her troubled relationship with her father, it wasn't readily apparent.

''At one point, she actually wrote him a letter trying to make peace with her past,'' recalled a friend of Ana's from her time at the University of Virginia. ``He wrote back. He was totally unapologetic.''

Dr. Montes eventually remarried, rejoined the Army and moved to the Hawaiian island of Oahu. He retired from the Army in 1995 with the rank of colonel, divorced his second wife and moved to South Florida, where he died of a heart attack two years ago.

Ana Montes graduated from the University of Virginia in 1979 with a degree in foreign affairs. She moved to Washington, D.C., where she enrolled in 1982 in a two-year master's degree program at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She focused on Latin America. Her degree was not awarded until 1988.

While she was studying, Montes got a clerical job at the Department of Justice that required a security clearance. She moved to the Defense Intelligence Agency as a junior analyst, focusing on Nicaragua, in September 1985.

By then, she already was a spy for Cuba.

How the Cuban intelligence service enlisted Montes is the subject of endless speculation among Cuba watchers. Some say it was a romance. Others say it was blackmail. Still others, including her lawyer and her mother, say it was sympathy for a small nation in the shadow of a colossus.

''She felt sorry for the Cubans,'' Emilia Montes said of her daughter. ``It wasn't Castro. It was seeing them living in misery. She was very young and idealistic.''

Wherever the truth, Ana Montes rubbed elbows with scores of people inside and outside the Pentagon, on Capitol Hill and at the State Department, taking part in and eventually leading briefings on Cuba. Colleagues and acquaintances describe her as no-nonsense.

''She was an unusual person,'' said an official who knew her casually and like many of her acquaintances declined to speak for attribution. ``She could be very warm and engaging on a personal level. She was kind of witty. She had a very sharp mind. But when you're discussing work or in a work environment, she could be very aloof and dogmatic.''

PRESSURE TO MARRY

Boyfriend was employed

by U.S. Southern Command

Montes dated occasionally, and like many daughters of Hispanic mothers came under pressure to find a partner and head to the altar.

'Her mom was on her all the time: `Why aren't you married?' '' recalled the old friend.

Montes did, in fact, have a boyfriend in recent times -- Roger Corneretto, a civilian employee in Miami of the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the hemisphere, including Cuba.

''She was going to get married,'' said Lilian Laszlo, a Baltimore resident and close friend of Emilia Montes.

Corneretto was transferred to the Joint Chiefs of Staff office in the Pentagon after Montes' arrest last year, shocked and grieving at the discovery of his girlfriend's double life.

Corneretto declined to talk with The Herald.

Montes is known to have traveled to New York City regularly, as well as to have taken overseas vacations alone to places like the Dominican Republic, where she may have received Cuban training to master the coded radio messages and computer decoding software that her espionage demanded.

How U.S. counterintelligence agents got onto Montes is not clear.

A former Cuban Interior Ministry cryptographer, Jose Cohen, who now lives in exile in South Florida, said he believes U.S. counterintelligence engineered a huge feat by cracking an encrypted Cuban message, perhaps to Montes.

''It is easier to win the lottery three times over than to break these codes,'' Cohen said.

APARTMENT SEARCHED

FBI reportedly found

evidence on computer

Whatever the tip-off, FBI agents 13 months ago searched Montes' apartment and surreptitiously copied the hard drive of her Toshiba laptop computer, recovering 11 pages of text between her and Cuban intelligence agents, court documents say. Montes' failure to fully erase the material appeared to be an act of carelessness unusual for her.

The Justice Department says Montes had turned over photos, documents and abundant classified material to Cuba. It says she revealed the identity of four undercover U.S. agents, handed over information about U.S. military games, and provided assessments to Cuba taken from the most top-secret internal files of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Montes, with a top-level clearance, had access to the Intelink computer network that connects about 60 federal intelligence, defense and civilian agencies involved in intelligence gathering and assessment.

''She had access to basically everything,'' the security official said. ``You're talking about programs that cost millions of dollars to develop. And she could get anything.''

As she funneled secrets, Montes also molded debate about Cuba on Capitol Hill and at the Pentagon and the State Department. In 1998, she was a principal drafter of a Pentagon paper that concluded that Cuba no longer represented a military threat to the United States.

In 1999, Montes was a principal briefer on an inter-agency war-game-like exercise about Cuba that may have required her to review U.S. military capabilities toward Cuba should turmoil erupt on the island, one U.S. official said.

Montes became a ''vociferous'' advocate of a controversial proposal to allow active U.S. military personnel into Cuba to develop relations with officers of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces, the official said. Critics feared that such a plan would expose U.S. military personnel to possible recruitment or compromise by Cuban intelligence.

Normally, with a spy like Montes in their sights, FBI agents would shadow her for months, even years, with the intention of identifying her handlers and bringing down an entire network.

But nine days after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the agents swooped in to arrest Montes, fearing that she represented an overriding security risk.

To this day, the Montes arrest has not generated the publicity of other major spy cases, such as the 1994 arrest of Aldrich Ames, a CIA employee whose betrayal of his country may have cost the lives of nine U.S. moles in the Soviet Union, and the early 2001 arrest of Robert Hanssen, a veteran FBI counterintelligence officer who earned $1.4 million as an agent for Russia.

Some think Montes ranks in the league of major turncoats.

''You could make the case that the potential for damage was more severe than with either Hanssen or Ames,'' an official said. ``She could have told them what, where and when [eventual U.S. military action would occur], and it would cost a hell of a lot of lives.''

As it is, some of the victims are alive and suffering silently.

Montes' brothers and sisters declined to speak about her.

''I'll be happy to talk to you sometime down the road, but not right now,'' said Juan Carlos Montes, the youngest sibling at 40, who operates a restaurant in South Florida.

''I still have sleepless nights,'' Montes' mother said. ``Your precious child in handcuffs in a jail. I can't bear it.''

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Herald staff writer Juan O. Tamayo and researcher Elisabeth Donovan contributed to this report.