Queen of Cuba Dethroned

The world is too much with us late and soon, as William Wordsworth pointed out, and so, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, are communist spies. Such operatives are not, as most professors would have us believe, a figment of our imagination.

“There are lots of people who have committed espionage,” says Scott W. Carmichael, author of True Believer: Inside the Investigation and Capture of Ana Montes, Cuba’s Master Spy. “The numbers are staggering.”

Carmichael spoke at the Heritage Foundation last month. “If you opened full field investigations on all the known Cuban agents in Washington, D. C. and Miami, you would need the full Washington, D. C. field office,” Carmichael says of the FBI’s monumental task.

The senior security and counterintelligence investigator for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Carmichael works with the FBI regularly. “They have been kicking our behinds in the intelligence game for more than four decades,” Carmichael says of our adversaries in Havana.

Carmichael is donating whatever profits his book may make to the family of an American soldier in El Salvador who may have lost his life due to a breach of U. S. intelligence perpetrated by the Cuban DGI. Another irony, or is it? These agents, from the McCarthy years, when intellectuals supposedly lived in fear, to the modern age, are sometimes mentored right on college campuses.

“Ana Montes was recruited as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins when she was overheard disagreeing with the Reagan Administration policies in Central America,” Carmichael says of the subject of his book and a DIA investigation that he pursued for about a half a decade.

In accepting her recruitment, Montes followed a Hopkins tradition of working for communist governments exemplified by past luminaries associated with the university such as Owen Lattimore and Alger Hiss. It should be noted that anti-communist stalwart Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy is also a Hopkins grad.

When she went to work at the DIA in 1985, she “already had a top secret clearance from the Department of Justice,” Carmichael recounts of Montes genesis as a traitor. Once ensconced in DIA, she became the go-to girl for information on Castro’s regime.

Such was her apparent acumen on the subject that insiders dubbed her the “Queen of Cuba.” Her highness reigned for around 15 years, passing every polygraph.

Eventually, co-workers became suspicious. “There are many examples of Ana spiking the work of other analysts,” Carmichael said at Heritage. Hence, her proactive efforts gave her the chance to not only pass secrets to Fidel but also influence U. S. foreign policy.

Montes was arrested shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks upon the United States when she was on the verge of receiving U. S. war plans in Afghanistan. These are plans that Castro conceivably could have passed on to our enemies were Ana not doing 20 years in a federal prison.

“Montes had no prior connection to Cuba; her parents were Puerto Rican, and her father was a U. S. Army officer,” Carmichael writes in True Believer. “She was born on a U. S. Army base in Germany and spent her high school years in Towson, Maryland—a home-grown agent if ever there was one.”

“Her case shows once and for all, if the fact required demonstrating, that Cuba has mounted a lasting, effective intelligence effort against the United States that we should pay more attention to.” Unlike recent Benedict Arnolds such as Aldrich Ames and more in the mold of subversives of old, Montes accepted no payment for her extracurricular work.

She believed Castro was the answer to the Western Hemisphere’s problems, hence the title of Carmichael’s book. Though possessed of a keen intelligence, she turned a blind or indifferent eye to Castro’s human rights practices in constructing her image of him as hero to the oppressed.

Montes displayed this blindness or indifference most acutely in her attitude towards the boat people braving shark-infested waters to escape Castro and seek refuge in the United States. “She referred to them as ‘worms,’ which, I believe, is the term or
characterization used also by the Cuban government to refer to them,” Carmichael informed me. “She never acknowledged that the Cuban government abused the Cuban people in any way.”

“She was blind, and naïve, in that sense.” For our part, we can afford to be neither myopic nor ignorant of the Analogues who may still hold security clearances in the federal government.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.