ESPIONAGELast of the ‘True Believers’ or Harbinger? Ana Montes and the Future of Espionage Against the West
Ana Montes was U.S. Intelligence’s ‘Queen of Cuba’. The Defense Intelligence Agency’s leading Central America analyst; go-to voice on Cuban intentions and capabilities; eldest daughter of a family dedicated to U.S. government service. She was also a Cuban spy her entire professional life. She was a ’True Believer’ –motivated not by material rewards but by commitment to Castro’s revolution and opposition to U.S. policy in Latin America.
Ana Montes was U.S. Intelligence’s ‘Queen of Cuba’. The Defense Intelligence Agency’s leading Central America analyst; go-to voice on Cuban intentions and capabilities; eldest daughter of a family dedicated to U.S. government service. She was also a Cuban spy her entire professional life, until arrested 10 days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Now, after almost 21 years in prison, Montes resides in Puerto Rico, an unrepentant critic of U.S. policy towards Cuba.
Montes represents an apparently extraordinary case of espionage. She is a Hispanic woman, recruited at university, while most spies have been white, middle-aged, middle-career men. As an agent, she not only stole secrets but shaped assessments and influenced policy in an adversary’s interests—and then there’s the sheer audacity of penetrating the heart of U.S. military intelligence. But she was also a ’True Believer’ –motivated not by material rewards but by commitment to Castro’s revolution and opposition to U.S. policy in Latin America. In her words:
‘I felt morally obligated to help [Cuba] defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it.’
She was the ‘I’ in the traditional schema of espionage motivations: MICE (Money, Ideology, Coercion/Compromise, Ego). Acknowledging that espionage cases are rarely singular in character and Montes’ ideology was buttressed by psychological issues around her early (and on her account, abusive) family life.
Montes might therefore be regarded as a throwback to ideologically-motivated spies of the interwar years and early Cold War—the ‘Cambridge Five’, George Blake, Karl Fuchs, the Goldbergs, etc. This espionage threat was meant to have been killed off by the atrocities and contradictions of communist reality; swept away by purges and by 1956 in Budapest (and Krushchev’s repudiation of Stalinism), 1968 in Prague and finally in 1989. Isn’t spying now a function only of the venal and disturbed? By grubby malcontents like Hanssen, Ames, Walker and Nicholson? Surely by the 1990s neoliberalism and the dollar’s pursuit had triumphed in the treason market as much as in attitudes to state ownership or to international financial transactions and currency conversion?
