Editorial • October 6, 2001.
The Washington Times
Another major security breach — this time at the Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA) — suggests a degree of inattentiveness,
sloppiness and Swiss-cheese-porosity within the U.S. intelligence-gathering
establishment that is truly shocking.
The case of Ana Belen Montes, a 44-year-old DIA senior analyst who
apparently provided communist Cuba with sensitive information for as long as a
decade, is merely the latest in a series of embarrassing revelations that have
understandably eroded public confidence in the system that is supposedly there
to protect America from her enemies, foreign and domestic. Yet, like FBI traitor
Robert Hanssen and before that CIA spy Aldrich Ames, Ana Belen Montes was
apparently able to feed her contacts within the Cuban government a veritable
horn o' plenty of sensitive material for years on end without raising any
suspicions. It would be funny in a Keystone Cops kind of way if it weren't so
serious — if people's lives were not on the line.
According to affidavits filed by government prosecutors, Montes
provided information about military exercises, the identity of undercover agents
and the methods by which the United States gathers intelligence, generally
speaking, on the Cubans. If she divulged the names of agents or elements within
the Cuban government helping the United States, it is highly likely they
suffered the same fate as the Soviet insiders whose identities were revealed by
Ames and Hanssen — death. Montes reportedly traveled to Cuba on several
occasions and, according to a story in The Washington Post, "played a key
role" in producing an intelligence assessment of Cuba's military that
concluded it "posed no threat " either to the United States or to
other nations in the region.
Montes, who was finally arrested Sept. 21, faces the death penalty if
she is convicted and does not strike a plea-bargain deal, as Hanssen managed to
do, that would spare her life.
The lesson to be taken from all of this is that a serious reassessment
of security protocols at American intelligence gathering organs is in order.
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