Ana Belen Montes, one of the highest-ranking US officials ever proven to have spied for Cuba, has been released from prison early, the US Bureau of Prisons said on Friday, after she spent more than two decades behind bars.
Montes, 65, had in 2002 pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage after she was accused of using her leading position as a Defense Intelligence Agency official to leak information to Havana, including the identities of some US spies.
She was sentenced to 25 years in prison at age 45.
Photo: Reuters
A US citizen of Puerto Rican descent, Montes began working for the agency in 1985 and rapidly climbed its ranks to become the agency’s top Cuba analyst.
Prosecutors said during this time that Montes received coded messages from Havana over a short-wave radio as strings of numbers, which she would type onto a decryption-equipped laptop to translate to text.
She was accused of supplying the identity of four US spies in Cuba, as well as other classified information.
Montes was arrested on Sept. 21, 2001, shortly before the US invaded Afghanistan. Her lawyer, a leading espionage specialist, had argued that she had cooperated with the investigation without reservation.
At her sentencing a year later, Montes said that she had obeyed her conscience and that US policy to Cuba was cruel and unfair.
“I felt morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it,” she said.
Ricardo Urbina, the sentencing judge, ruled that Montes put fellow US citizens and the “nation as a whole” at risk.
On her release from prison, Urbino had ordered Montes to be placed under supervision for five years, with her Internet access monitored and a ban from working for governments and contacting foreign agents without permission.
Under US President Joe Biden, the US has eased some sanctions on Cuba, but has maintained its Cold War-era embargo on the nation and stepped up restrictions on illegal migrants, who are arriving in record levels amid raging inflation and medicine shortages.
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