The Miami Herald
U.S. intelligence analyst charged with spying for Cuba
By Tim Johnson. tjohnson@krwashington.com. Published
Saturday, September 22, 2001
WASHINGTON -- FBI agents on Friday detained a 44-year-old senior analyst
with the Defense Intelligence Agency, a vital part of the U.S. national security
establishment, and charged her with providing U.S. national secrets to Cuba.
The information relayed to the Cuban government, according to papers filed
in federal court in the District of Columbia, included the identity of a U.S.
intelligence officer operating undercover in Cuba.
The woman, Ana Belen Montes, was arrested around 10 a.m. at Defense
Intelligence headquarters in the southern part of the capital, FBI spokesman
Chris Murray said.
Montes began working at the agency, which provides political and military
intelligence to the Pentagon, in 1985 and had risen to a level that gave her
access to a wide variety of intelligence, according to a criminal complaint
filed in Washington, D.C., federal court.
"Since 1992, she has specialized in Cuba matters. She is currently the
senior analyst responsible for matters pertaining to Cuba,'' the complaint said.
Montes, among more than a dozen arrested by U.S. law enforcement since
September 1998 and charged with spying for Cuba, had greater access to secrets
than the others. As a senior analyst, she participated in inter-agency meetings
involving discussion on Cuba and the rest of Latin America, Capitol Hill sources
said.
The criminal complaint said Montes was born in Nuremberg, Germany, and
graduated from the University of Virginia in 1979. She also held a master's
degree from the prestigious School of Advanced International Studies at Johns
Hopkins University.
An FBI official, who asked to remain anonymous, said she was Puerto Rican.
According to the court document, Montes maintained contact with her Cuban
intelligence agency handlers by calling their beepers from pay phones and
punching in coded numerical sequences.
On May 25, brandishing a court-authorized warrant, law enforcement officials
secretly entered Montes' second-floor unit at the Cleveland Apartments off
Connecticut Avenue in northwest Washington, an area of tony restaurants and
stores. They found a portable computer, the complaint said.
"The agents electronically copied the laptop's hard drive. During
subsequent analysis of the copied hard drive, the FBI recovered substantial text
. . .,'' it said, adding that 11 pages of material was recovered.
Among the contents, it added, were instructions on how to erase material
from the computer, tips for radio reception, and references to "the numbers
that you receive via radio.'' A short-wave radio was also found. The complaint
said that the FBI identified text consisting of 150 sets of numerical groups.
"The text begins, '30107 24624,' and continues until 150 such groups
are listed. The FBI has determined that the precise same numbers, in the precise
same order, were broadcast on February 6, 1999, at AM frequency 7887 kHz, by a
woman speaking Spanish, who introduced the broadcast with the words 'Atención!
Atención!' '' the complaint said.
It asserts that the technique of receiving coded data over short-wave radio
is common with Cuban intelligence, and is the same method that 10 convicted
Cuban spies arrested in South Florida in 1998 used to contact their handlers.
Montes followed other patterns used by convicted South Florida spies, it
added, such as exchanging computer disks with Cuban intelligence agents and
frequently calling from pay phones to send coded pages to beeper numbers.
The text lifted from her hard drive, it said, included praise from Montes'
alleged Cuban handler for her unmasking "a U.S. intelligence officer who
was present in an undercover capacity, in Cuba, during a period that began prior
to October 1996.
"We told you how tremendously useful the information you gave us from
the meetings with him resulted, and how we were waiting here for him with open
arms,'' the text said, according to the complaint.
The ultimate fate of the intelligence officer was not disclosed in the court
papers.
As recently as Sunday, surveillance teams spotted Montes making calls from
pay phones to beeper numbers and punching in pre-assigned codes, the complaint
said.
The FBI said it had pending search warrant requests for Montes' apartment,
her red Toyota Echo, her office at Bolling Air Force Base, and for a safe
deposit box.
Friday's arrest came three weeks after FBI agents detained two Cuban
intelligence agents in Florida, husband and wife George and Marisol Gari, and
charged them with trying to infiltrate the U.S. Southern Command military
facility in Miami, which oversees military operations in Latin America.
The Garis also conducted surveillance of the Cuban American National
Foundation offices. They pleaded guilty Thursday to acting as unregistered
agents for Cuba.
Members of the Cuban-American community said they suspected that FBI agents
moved in to arrest Montes, who had been under surveillance for four months, to
stop leaks to Cuba as U.S. forces mount a war on the Osama bin Laden network.
"It was critically important that this spy be stopped now as we embark
on the worldwide war against terrorism,'' said Rep. Lincoln Díaz-Balart,
a Miami Republican.
CANF's voice to Cuba muted
Officials pondering alternative to short-wave transmissions to
dissidents
By Elaine De Valle. edevalle@herald.com. Posted at 10:48
a.m. EDT Saturday, September 22, 2001
Two months after Ninoska Pérez Castellón left the Cuban
American National Foundation over the fate of her shortwave radio transmissions,
leaders at the influential lobby have pulled the plug on La Voz de la Fundación.
"They came to the office to say it was being closed, that it was the
last day we would be transmitting to Cuba,'' said Ileana Curra, who has worked
there since 1998, recording interviews with dissidents and independent
journalists for later broadcast.
"I can get another job. What worries me is those who oppose the
government in Cuba,'' said Curra. "They are more repressed than ever today
and now they have no voice. Nobody will hear them.''
But CANF Executive Director Joe Garcia said the group had not turned its
back on island dissidents and that the Voice of the Foundation would still exist
-- just not on shortwave. He declined to give details about other venues.
"There are other alternatives to reaching Cuba, and we're going to try
to exploit all those alternatives,'' Garcia said.
Other sources said the foundation may try to buy airtime on AM radio
stations that reach Cuba and will transmit a daily news program with the same
The Voice of the Foundation name.
The shutdown of the shortwave arm of the foundation, which began
broadcasting in 1989, comes as the foundation struggles to redefine its role in
Miami's exile community after the public departure of at least 20 board members.
They resigned last month saying they disagreed with the organization's direction
after Jorge Mas Santos took over the reins when his father, founder Jorge Mas
Canosa, died from cancer in 1997.
The split was over issues like Mas' support of the Latin Grammys move to
Miami -- subsequently switched back to Las Angeles and scratched after the
terrorist attacks on the nation -- his "dictatorial'' style and control
over the organization's funds. Members said the group has deviated from its
principles, and its mission.
Although Pérez Castellón had cited the decision to stop or
decrease transmissions as the main reason for her resignation July 19 -- a
decision Garcia and other leaders denied at the time -- she did not feel
vindicated.
"This is not the kind of situation where you can feel good about being
right,'' Perez said.
"It hurts so much, and it's worse that they did it on the day of Jorge
Mas Canosa's birthday,'' she said. "This project meant so much to him. They
have destroyed the labor of Jorge Mas Canosa and so many other men and women who
dedicated their lives to the foundation.''
Garcia said the decision was made after much consideration.
"It's something we had a committee working on for quite a while. It was
simply not effective for such a huge use of resources, and we decided we had to
move to another format.''
The shortwave radio branch cost the organization between $500,000 and
$600,000 a year, Garcia said, including salaries, office space, equipment, long
distance telephone calls to Cuba and the transmissions themselves.
"We shouldn't be pouring good money after bad,'' Garcia said,
explaining that the transmissions were not getting through to much of Cuba and
not at all to Havana. "It's being jammed. It has a very small audience in
the last two years. And therefore we need to engage our resources in things that
are effective.''
The election of President Bush helped leaders reach the decision, he added.
"We feel very confident about the leadership at TV and Radio Marti and
the fact that this administration is very committed to getting information into
Cuba, and that affects how we use the Voice and its resources,'' Garcia said. "We
need to make sure that when we're doing things, it shouldn't be duplicative or
repetitive and it should be effective.
Garcia said the foundation needs to dedicate resources to projects that are
having an effect in Cuba: legislative work, lobbying work and publications.
The Voice of the Foundation was once "a very effective tool,'' Garcia
said, before the Cuban government began interrupting transmissions.
"In the last two years, we have dedicated a number of resources and we
increased staff. We made more phone calls to Cuba than ever before. But it was
not being as effective as it should be for that kind of expenditure. It's a
major, major expense.
Pérez said it was untrue that the transmissions had stopped reaching
an audience.
"That is a lie. He doesn't know how to measure the audience nor has he
ever tried. We were reaching people and, more important, we gave the Cuban
people a voice,'' Perez said, adding that it was not wise to count on future
transmissions by Radio Marti.
Curra said she believed the decision was financially motivated because her
last two paychecks from the Jorge Mas Canosa Freedom Foundation had bounced. The
$16,000-a-year employee said the foundation then paid her in cash for the first
check and she expected the same for the second. The last check will come next
Friday for her and the other employees, who were paid on the 15th and 30th of
the month.
Garcia said that of seven employees, only Omar Lopez Montenegro, who was the
voice on the Voice since the day Pérez Castellón left, would stay
on.
"Omar works also on human rights and other issues related to the
foundation,'' Garcia said.
Copyright 2001 Miami Herald | 
