THE THOUGHTS OF THE PEOPLE OF SULTENG – This espionage action was not a short operation, but a structured betrayal that stretched over 17 years, from 1984 to 2001. Ana Montes was first approached by Cuban intelligence when she was still working at the US Department of Justice. At the direction of his handler, he applied and was successful in entering Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Pentagon’s military intelligence agency. The undercover drama ended dramatically exactly 10 days after the 9/11 tragedy, shortly before the US military invaded Afghanistan.
At a macro level, the brains of this espionage operation is DGI (Dirección General de Inteligencia), namely the foreign intelligence service of the Cuban government formed by the Fidel Castro regime. However, on a micro level, Ana Montes herself was the intellectual mastermind of the operation’s execution.
Unlike conventional spies who are framed or threatened, Montes operates on the basis of pure ideology. He consciously hated President Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy towards Central America, which he considered cruel and unfair. So loyal to this ideology, Montes refused to be paid a single penny by Cuba, working purely to defend Cuba from domination by his own country.
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Astute Without a Trace
By day, Ana Montes is a senior CIA/DIA analyst with a stellar reputation who holds complete authority on Cuban geopolitical data. Everyone in the US intelligence community respected his analysis. However, once night falls, it transforms into America’s biggest national security nightmare.
The espionage methods used by Montes were truly genius for his time. Montes knows that bringing home secret documents or wearing flash disk is academic suicide. So, he used the photographic abilities of his brain. All day he just read and memorized secret Pentagon defense documents at his desk.
Arriving at his apartment, Montes poured everything inside his head into a personal laptop, transferred the data to a diskette, and encoded it using a secret encryption module provided by Cuba.
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Instructions from Havana were sent to him via numeric code via shortwave radio (short-wave radio). Once the code was received, he would go to the pay phone on the corner of Washington Street to dial the messenger agent’s number (handler).
The damage Montes caused was deadly. He leaked the entire US military monitoring capacity against Cuba, undermined intelligence estimates, and even coldly revealed the true identities of four secret agents (undercover) The US is infiltrating Cuba.
The Queen’s Fall Was Cut Short by the Tragedy of 9/11
The Pentagon’s internal defense system actually suspected Montes’ left-leaning political views in 1996, but he managed to pass a polygraph test (lie detector). The turning point occurred when the FBI detected a ghost leak in Washington. Through pattern analysis, physical surveillance, and undercover searches, FBI agents begin to piece together a puzzle that leads straight to Montes’ apartment.
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The FBI actually wanted to delay the arrest in order to trap the handler (handler) his Cuba in a face-to-face meeting. However, the WTC twin towers collapsed on September 11, 2001. As the main analyst, Montes would automatically be given access to plans for the US military invasion of Afghanistan. Worried about the Pentagon’s war plans leaking into the hands of outside enemies, the FBI moved quickly. On September 21, 2001, he was arrested in his office without resistance.
In 2002, Ana Montes pleaded guilty to espionage conspiracy charges to avoid the death penalty, and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. After spending more than two decades in a maximum security prison, the Queen of Cuba was finally released in January 2023. Her story remains on the FBI’s record as one of the most dangerous ideological penetrations ever to tear apart the Pentagon’s defense system from the inside.***
