Ana Belén Montes turned 64 years old last Sunday in one of the pavilions of hell. A US citizen and daughter of Puerto Ricans, she has been incarcerated since 2001 in the Federal Medical Center (FMC) prison in Fort Worth, Texas, reserved for very dangerous criminals with mental problems.
You can only receive visits from a sibling. You are not allowed to talk on the phone, receive newspapers, magazines, or watch television. Nor do they allow him to interact with other people in that prison, where he has been in absolute solitude for two decades.
Montes was the highest-ranking intelligence analyst specialized in Cuba within the DIA ranks. She managed to advance rapidly through the ranks of said organization, in which her colleagues regarded her as a responsible and trustworthy person, and did not notice any nonsensical attitude in her.
Montes’ moral reasons
She was accused of espionage, but her great crime has been putting conscience above personal safety, a successful career and a gifted life in a Washington suburb. According to her defense attorney, Plato Cacheris, Montes committed espionage for moral reasons, because “she felt that Cubans were being treated unfairly by the United States.”
In the documents containing the charges against Montes, the federal prosecutors who accused her alleged that: “Montes communicated with the Cuban Intelligence Service through coded messages and received instructions via encrypted short-wave transmissions from Cuba.” In addition, Montes communicated with his Cuban controllers through coded numerical messages written on paper, which he then transmitted to his Cuban controllers through public telephones located in the area of the District of Columbia itself or in the neighboring state of Maryland. The codes he used used to include the phrases “I got a message” or “Danger.”
In 2002, Montes pleaded guilty to the charges that had been brought against her, which could have earned her the death penalty, but was finally sentenced to 25 years in prison in October of that year, after reaching an agreement. with the prosecution (regarding specifying what type of information had actually passed to the Cuban intelligence services).
Montes’s plea
In her plea before the judge who convicted her, Ana Belén Montes affirms: «Honorable, I got involved in the activity that has brought me before you because I obeyed my conscience rather than obeying the law. I consider our government’s policy towards Cuba to be cruel and unfair, deeply unfriendly, I consider myself morally obliged to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose on it our values and our political system … It is possible that the right to exist of Cuba, free from political and economic coercion, does not justify having handed over classified information to the island so that it could defend itself. I can only say that I did what I considered most appropriate to counteract a great injustice.
According to the list of the United States Bureau of Prisons, it bears the number 25037-016, it must be released on July 1, 2023 and when it does, it will surely maintain the same discretion with which it entered the jail and maintained during his life in freedom.
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