They assured that the detention was not related to the attacks, but “had a lot to do with the protection of the country at a time when national security was of the utmost importance.”
On January 7, 2023, that woman, Ana Belén Montes (Nuremberg, February 28, 1957), was released from the FMC Carswell prison in Fort Worth, Texas, after serving 21 of her 25-year sentence for “conspiracy to deliver U.S. national defense information to Cuba in violation of Title 18 of the United States Code, section 794 (c),” as stated in the note of her arrest.
The American of Puerto Rican origin and now 65 years old, at the time of her arrest was a senior analyst at the DIA, where she had collected information for the Cuban intelligence services for seventeen years.
She was working at the Department of Justice when Cuban agents recruited her. She became the main analyst dedicated to political and military issues on the island at the DIA. “The Queen of Cuba,” she was called in the U.S. intelligence circles.
After nearly twenty years of undercover service, Belén Montes pleaded guilty and was convicted. Her case caused a stir in the U.S. intelligence services, as she turned out to be the highest-ranking U.S. official who has served Cuban intelligence.
From straight-A student to undercover agent
Ana Belén Montes was born on a United States Army base in Nuremberg (1957), the eldest daughter of Puerto Ricans of Asturian origin Emilia and Alberto Montes (military doctor). Back in the United States, the family settled in the state of Kansas; before moving to Iowa and then to Towson (Baltimore).
While she was pursuing a degree in International Relations at the University of Virginia, in 1977 Ana Belén traveled to Spain for studies. There she met an Argentine left-wing student, who would have “opened her eyes” to the support of the U.S. government for authoritarian regimes, according to what Ana Colón, her former classmate, told The Washington Post in 2013.
Upon graduation, Montes moved to Puerto Rico; but she failed to find work; so she soon accepted a job offer as a typist at the Department of Justice in Washington DC.
At 27, in 1984, she had won an administrative position in the Department. While she was working there, she was pursuing a master’s degree at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
The Department of Justice maintains that it is there that she was recruited by Puerto Rican Marta Rita Velázquez Hernández, who presented her to the Cuban Intelligence Service that same year, convinced of her potential as an informant.
When she got a job with the DIA in 1985, she was already working for the Cuban intelligence services.
“The first day she entered the Defense Intelligence Agency, Montes was already a full-time recruited agent for the Cuban Intelligence Service. Every day that she went to work, her goal was to memorize the three most important things that she thought Cubans needed to know to protect themselves from the United States,” Peter Lapp, one of the two FBI agents in charge of the investigation against Montes, told the BBC, who will publish this year The Queen of Cuba, a book about the case and the interviews he did with the agent to understand the scope of her collaboration with Cuba.
The analyst tried not to remove any material from the facilities where she worked. She would memorize the information that she considered of interest and reproduce it later on a personal computer in her home, the FBI said after her arrest.
Once written, she would transfer the information to encrypted floppy disks and await shortwave radio code instructions to meet with her superior and dispatch the information.
“I would just go have lunch with them and hand them the floppy disk. Without secret hiding places, without brush passes, nor any sophisticated espionage techniques, they were simply a Hispanic man and woman having a long lunch in a Chinese restaurant on a Sunday afternoon,” Lapp explains.
In an emergency, Montes could make calls from a public booth to pagers of her Cuban contacts. There was a code to report when in danger and another to request a meeting.
Even though it was a very high-risk, full-time job, she received no money in return. “In fact, she told us that she would have been offended if the Cubans had given her money to spy,” Lapp says. Identified and detained, Ana Belén assured that her motive had been the need for justice; the attempt to help Cubans protect themselves from U.S. policies.
“The policy of our government towards Cuba is cruel, unfair and profoundly unfriendly. And I felt morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it,” she declared in court in October 2002.
Suspicions, undercover investigation and arrest
At the DIA they detected her position towards U.S. policies vis-à-vis other countries and had some concern about her access to highly classified information. But no one had reason to think that she was leaking secrets.
In 1996, a colleague “sensed” that Montes might be collaborating with Cuban intelligence and reported it to a security officer. In the interview they did with her, Montes denied any accusation. In addition, she passed the polygraph test. A year later, CIA Director George Tenet would award her with the National Intelligence Certificate of Distinction, the third-highest award in the field. It would not be the only recognition.
Between 1985 and 2001, Montes was promoted several times, and received ten other special recognitions for her work. “She was a very good analyst,” the investigators in charge of her case acknowledged.
The interview they did with her was archived until four years later, when the colleague who suspected learned that the FBI was looking for an active agent from Washington who would be providing information to the Cuban government; and he got in touch.
Using undercover searches, physical and electronic surveillance, the FBI found evidence against Ana Belén Montes. The agents delayed the arrest to try to reach her Cuban contact. However, the terrorist attacks of September 11 accelerated the process. The FBI and DIA made the decision to arrest her.
She was about to be promoted to a position in the National Intelligence Council, an entity that advises the director of the CIA, even though she had been under investigation for almost a year.
After her arrest, Montes negotiated an agreement with the U.S. authorities under which she would collaborate with the investigation on the condition that she not receive a sentence of more than 25 years in prison.
In practice, the collaboration meant that the former analyst would be submitted to interrogations two or three times a week for seven months to make available to the FBI the required details.
On December 12, 2002, just a few weeks after the Montes sentence was known, Fidel Castro answered a question about her put to him by American journalist Andrea Mitchell:
“A noble and good U.S. person who is against an injustice, against a blockade of more than 40 years, against all the terrorist acts that were committed against Cuba, and is capable of reacting in this way, is an exceptional person.… She is a person who, given this attitude and not simply out of gratitude, but out of a sense of justice, deserves respect and admiration.”
After the release of the three Cuban agents, members of the Wasp Network, who were still imprisoned in the United States in 2014, Montes was left as the only agent at the service of Cuba who was still in prison.
A few years ago, in a letter to a relative, she wrote from her confinement: “There are certain things in life that are worth going to jail for. Or the ones worth killing oneself for after doing them.”
Prison and sickness
Miriam Montes Mock, Ana Belén’s cousin, heads the Working Group for Ana Belén Montes, an association created in 2015 to campaign for her release.
In December 2017, Montes Mock published a testimony about the life of her cousin in prison; in particular after having undergone surgery for breast cancer:
Devastating news: cancer of the right breast. A mastectomy. Physical and emotional trauma. Loneliness. The visits to the hospital, chained, in pain. The discovery of solidarity in her cellmates. Uncertainty. Again the pain. The longing for her family. And recently, the news that brought tears to her eyes every time she saw, through the CNN channel in Spanish that the Carswell prison broadcasts, the destruction of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.
This is how I understand that the year 2017 was for my cousin.
Her name is Ana Belén Montes. She is a Puerto Rican prisoner who is serving a twenty-five-year sentence for obeying her conscience and showing solidarity with the Cuban people in the face of the U.S. government’s aggressive policies.
This year, Ana Belén turned sixty in prison.
She is still subject to special administrative measures, which limit her access to the world outside the prison. She has been silenced and isolated for sixteen years. She is only allowed to communicate with a handful of family and friends who knew her before her arrest. No one can quote the words that Ana has spoken since her imprisonment. No one can echo her pain, the pain that any woman experiences in the face of the mutilation of her body and the uncertainty of her future. No one. Just imagine it.
Cancer is a debilitating disease for every human being, much more so when it is suffered inside a prison. It pains me to think that Ana faces this health condition without the support of her loved ones, without the possibility of choosing a doctor she trusts, alternative or palliative treatments, a diet rich in vegetables and fresh fruits, or at least someone to vent it. On the contrary, Ana has had to face cancer in an environment of constant vigilance. In a place where noise, violence, emotional hostility…and loneliness prevail. In the midst of that chaos, Ana recovered from her surgery.
The jailers took her from the prison to the hospital, chained hand and foot, with a thick chain tied around her waist, from which she hangs a heavy shackle where the chains on her waist meet with those on her feet. And a wound on her chest.
During this stormy year, Ana dedicated herself to recovering her strength.
Her short-term goal: to be alive and cancer-free for the next five years. Despite the conditions in which she lives.
Her long-term goal: return to the free community, if not before then at least July 1, 2023.
Anna is strong. At least, that’s what I think. For almost four months she was unable to write letters. Then she started little by little: half a page, one page, two…as she endured the pang of a pinched nerve in her right arm. Her back pain returned. Her cellmates in prison took care of her. It was, perhaps, a hug from heaven.
She restarted her readings. She “knew” Pedro Albizu Campos and his sacrifice in favor of the independence of Puerto Rico. She was close to the Puerto Rican nationalist heroic deeds. She “traveled the world” with Pope Francis and she allowed herself to be imbued with his compassionate spirit. She smiled as she “listened” to the dialogues between the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. She has been interested in studying, with her usual meticulousness, the 1897 Autonomous Charter, the Paris Treaty, and other documents that show the political trajectory of the island. But Ana is not allowed to publicly articulate her reflections on the political trajectory of Puerto Rico; nor on the ideological currents worldwide; nor about philosophies or religions.
The Working Group headed by Montes Mock declares that “Ana Belén was sentenced to 25 years in prison by a United States court for having protected the rights of the Cuban people in the face of hostility, state terrorism, and attacks against it by United States security agencies and military forces.
Freedom
Ana Belén Montes flew to Puerto Rico after her release. There she will lead “a quiet and private existence,” she said in a statement through her attorney, Linda Backiel.
She is to continue under supervision for five years, including control of her Internet use. She is also prohibited from working for the government or contacting foreign agents without permission.
“I encourage those who want to focus on me to instead focus on important issues, like the serious problems facing the Puerto Rican people or the U.S. economic embargo on Cuba,” Montes said.
“Who in the last 60 years has asked the Cuban people if they want the United States to impose a suffocating embargo that makes them suffer? I as a person am irrelevant. I don’t matter,” she added.
Heroes, moles and villains
By Rafael Hernandez
How does the case of Ana Belén Montes compare with the constellation of notorious agents, spies, “moles,” “whistleblowers” who, from the Cold War to today, have been brought to light and tried for violating the law and exposing U.S. security?
Impartially and realistically examining a case like that of this Pentagon military intelligence analyst, accused and convicted of providing information to Cuba, is not an easy task. On the one hand, a considerable part of her history, for security reasons, remains hidden. On the other hand, the main versions that circulate, the books, interviews, chronicles about the case, have been the work of agents who directly intervened in the investigation, the interrogation, the arrest, and the charges of the Prosecutor’s Office.
They are DIA and FBI officers Scott Carmichael and Peter Lapp, and the interrogator, Lieutenant Colonel Chris Simmons, in charge of providing the main evidence against her. Having played an active role as “parties” in the prosecution, their ability as impartial judges is, shall we say, uncertain.
To address the issue with a minimum of rigor that helps us orient ourselves in a field full of gaps and biased versions, it is necessary to go to sources with professional experience and a level of analysis. I have found two.
Respondents
One is Fulton Armstrong, whom I have known since he served as Economic and Political Counselor in the U.S. Interests Section in Havana (1989-1991). Fulton was Chief National Intelligence Officer (2000-2004); CIA senior analyst on Cuba; director of Cuba in the National Security Council; and Senior Advisor on Latin America to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He currently works as a professor and researcher on the region at American University, Washington D.C.
The other is Jesús Arboleya, whom I met when he was the Cuban Consul in Washington, at the end of the 1970s; and an active participant in the dialogue with representatives of emigration between 1978 and 1979. His subsequent academic work, as a researcher on relations with the United States and the history of the Revolution, is known in various institutions; in particular, his books on the counterrevolution and state terrorism against Cuba, emigration, and other national security issues.
Before sharing my conversation with them, I will do a little history, without which it is impossible to understand almost anything, and less the issues at the heart of the issue, a matter not merely legal, judicial or technical, but very political.
Whistleblowers and spies
Two years before the end of the U.S. invasion called the Vietnam War, a military analyst with access to top-secret information released thousands of classified documents on the handling of the war to several major U.S. newspapers. Despite not secretly giving them to “a foreign power,” the charges against him were based on the Espionage Act of 1917, plus theft and conspiracy. The prosecutor asked for 115 years in prison.
Considering the government’s deceptive conduct exposed by the Pentagon papers, legal technicalities about the collection of evidence, and in the midst of the Watergate scandal, the judge acquitted him. Since then, Daniel Ellsberg has received numerous recognitions and decorations. The Olof Palme Award for “his profound humanism and exceptional moral courage” is the last of them.
Chelsea Manning, a military intelligence analyst, did something similar by revealing thousands of documents about the invasion of Afghanistan. Even though she/he turned them over to Wikileaks, and not to a foreign intelligence service, she/he, too, was tried under the Espionage Act, on charges of “aiding the enemy.” He came to face the application of capital punishment, life imprisonment, and a final sentence of 35 years.
Solidarity with the Manning case spanned the European Union, the UN, human rights agencies, congresspeople and political leaders from the United States and other countries. When the sentence was commuted by President Obama, she/he had served seven years.
Working for the CIA and NSA, Edward Snowden uncovered hundreds of thousands of documents about the illegal surveillance of citizens of the United States and around the world by these agencies. He thus revealed how secret technologies were used to violate the privacy and sovereignty of other countries, including allied political leaders, to the detriment of their basic rights.
Snowden did not hand over the data exclusively to Russian Intelligence, as famous moles embedded in the CIA or Military Intelligence did; although it was in Moscow where he took refuge and resides as a citizen, invited by Putin in person. Among the charges pending against him in U.S. courts is that of espionage.
The extent of the secrets exposed to public view (also usable by enemies of the United States), in these and numerous other cases, seriously damaged U.S. national security interests in various areas, according to the government.
There were top-secret plans, ongoing military actions, proposed nuclear attacks against other powers, massacres of civilians in the theater of war, cybersecurity controls, revealed through tens of thousands of facsimile pages and videos, with tons of operational details, names of hundreds of officers, agents, informants, you name it.
Despite these flagrant violations of the law, having seriously harmed “U.S. national security interests.” in the context of the Cold War or the war against terrorism, of having placed the country’s agents and military in a situation of maximum vulnerability, Snowden, Manning and Ellsberg are seen by most as heroes in the cause of freedom and against injustice.
The list of similar cases can be extended indefinitely, including those who, for money, gave top-secret information to the former USSR or other “foreign powers.” Despite the highly sensitive information trafficked by these moles, in most cases the sentences were not as high as might be expected.
Marines with access to the secret keys to state-of-the-art nuclear aircraft carriers, who received 25-year sentences, and served 15 (Michael Walker). Senior Army officers with access to the Joint Chiefs of Staff Intelligence Agency who passed on all kinds of information about U.S. nuclear missile systems and air defense, sentenced to 15 years (William Whalen). CIA officers who sold the KGB classified information, including the identity of more than thirty agents inside the USSR, with sentences of 18 years, commuted to 10 (David Barnett). Marines who, for money, supplied classified information to the USSR, for twenty-five years, with the names of U.S. undercover agents, originally sentenced to 30 years, only serving 9 (Clayton Lonetree). Etc.
The conversation
What follows are fragments of my conversation with Fulton and Arboleya, which I have tried to articulate in a coherent text in which it is possible to appraise the visions, sometimes different, of each one. I am very grateful to both of them for their accompaniment in this “passage from the unknown.”
Fulton says: “Some people have employed public strategies to handle this story for maximum effect and benefit. One motivation could of course be to make a profit. That is the ‘American way’ of benefiting from public service. Another motivation could be to reduce the embarrassment both agencies feel about the extent of their long failure to detect and identify penetration. Montes was active for many years, and they had no idea. And when they finally got an idea, they were very slow and clumsy in their actions. They [DIA and FBI officers Scott Carmichael and Peter Lapp] are taking advantage of the fact that others with knowledge of the case have chosen to remain silent — maintaining their commitment to secrecy — even though they played roles that were, of course, somehow, more important than theirs. A final reason may be the satisfaction of being seen as heroes of the Cuban-American ‘community.’ But I’m speculating.”
Montes was recruited by the Cuban DGI in 1984, when she was a student at Johns Hopkins, in the midst of the U.S. intervention in the Central American wars. Are her political ideas an exceptional case among those who were interested in Latin American problems in those years?
“The story of Ana Belén,” says Arboleya, “is that of thousands of people who, due to their own anti-imperialist convictions and encouraged by the rejection of the U.S. policy against Cuba, have been willing to give their lives for the Cuban revolutionary cause. In this case there is the particularity that solidarity takes shape in the field of intelligence, but Ana Belén could have acted in any other scenario.”
Fulton points out that “the policies undertaken by the Reagan administration, immediately after the Carter era, produced much rejection among Latin American observers in Washington. U.S. support for the Nicaraguan Contras and the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala ignored the human rights implications and the underlying polarized debate. Montes’ sentiments were not unique; but her intensity was apparently a factor in her vulnerability to recruitment. Based on her own statements, it was clear that her personal moral convictions about U.S. policy toward Cuba, in particular, became the primary drive of her decision. (Obviously I never discussed any of this with her).”
According to the DIA and FBI officers who have built the predominant narrative on the case of Ana Belén Montes, the information that she passed to Cuba was highly dangerous for the national security of the United States. What was the military risk that exposed the United States to Cuba? To what extent can Montes’ actions be characterized as betrayal of “U.S. national interest”?
“Turning the matter into a witch hunt only makes things worse,” says Fulton, “one or two of those individuals have spread vicious rumors about people in the U.S. government, U.S. think tanks and the Miami ‘community’ with whose views they disagree. In addition, the efforts of the Bush-Cheney administration to discredit the work of the intelligence community in the wake of the Montes affair were extremely damaging to the intelligence community.”
For Arboleya, “the concept of national security of the United States has been built on the basis of an alleged right to intervene in the affairs of other countries, and only in this sense can the work of Ana Belén be understood as a danger to that country, since not even her accusers could show that it had aggressive purposes.”
Fulton adds: “Phrases like ‘highly dangerous’ are easy to use when talking about a penetration as deep, long and fruitful as Montes’, who gained access to a large number of sensitive programs. Publicly available information indicates that she jeopardized intelligence operations, which the agencies involved surely thought were in the national interest. They almost certainly believed that these were the subject of a ‘presidential decision,’ meaning that they were supported — in principle, though not in detail — at the highest level. As far as it is concerned, it compromised the identity of intelligence officers operating outside the United States, something that no government or agency would look favorably on.”
“Montes’ actions were a serious crime and caused great harm. Assessing the true damage to U.S. national security would require a comprehensive review of U.S. policy during those years, including whether much of the ‘spy warfare’ activity it engaged in was driven by political factors, or by grudges from agencies that had been embarrassed by Cuba (say, by revelations such as ‘The CIA’s War on Cuba’ in the 1980s), or by the momentum initially created by the ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’, or due to concrete knowledge of an active threat on the part of Cuba.”
“Interestingly, a ‘threat assessment’ of Cuba prepared by the intelligence community for Congress in 1998, incorrectly attributed to Montes (who produced a draft that was totally rewritten, and whose new version was approved by all fifteen intelligence agencies of the community), said that Cuba was an ‘insignificant conventional threat’ to the United States.”
Given that these same sources argue that Cuba was selling the information that Ana Belén gave it to other governments — such as Russia, Iraq, China, Afghanistan —, I ask: Is there evidence that this was the case? Or that Cuba handed over that information to countries or organizations that could use it in plans of aggression against the United States?
“I don’t know,” Fulton replies, “but circumstantial evidence, based on Cuban solidarity with those countries and past practices, would suggest that sharing was likely.”
Arboleya disagrees: “The story that Cuba was going around the world selling the information it obtained is a media invention that lacks all proof and is not supported by the very logic of this type of activity.”
According to the officers in charge of the case, when they had indications that there was a “mole” in the Pentagon, they meticulously and brilliantly connected the dots until they discovered it. In this version reproduced by the large-scale media, particularly on Miami television, the “mole” within Cuban intelligence, Rolando Sarraff Trujillo, is made invisible, the same man who is credited with having provided the secret keys that led to the identification of the Wasp Network, and that he would be released by virtue of a negotiating process for the exchange of prisoners that would open the political dialogue between the United States and Cuba, which would end on December 17.
To what extent did the rise of the war against terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11 taint the virulence of the charges against Ana Belén, and determine her sentence? To what extent are the sources interested in continuing to present Montes as “the most dangerous spy in history” serving those who are opposed to improving relations today?
“Since language matters,” says Arboleya, “the term ‘spy’ is used to try to morally disqualify her commitment and the magnitude of her sacrifice; but history is full of good spies, heroes of their countries. Everything lies in the cause that is defended and the reasons that inspire the risk. This distinction is the key to understanding Ana Belén’s attitude and showing admiration for her integrity. It does not cease to attract attention that what bothers Marco Rubio the most is that she has acted without any economic interest. According to him, she has been motivated by an alleged hatred of the United States. The love for Cuba is a motivation that is far from the understanding capacity of the U.S. senator.”
Fulton concludes: “I cannot comment on Sarraff’s role, the Wasp Network’s engagement or anyone else’s involvement in this matter. I cannot gauge how much, if at all, the U.S. investigators involved embellished it to better market their books and interests. But I believe that the legal proceedings that led to Montes’ imprisonment were clean and uninfluenced by the investigators’ ambitions. In the end, she admitted to her crimes and accepted responsibility for them.
“I would not feel comfortable speculating on the political intentions of those who talk about the implications of the release of the ‘most dangerous spy in history.’ I don’t think they hide their political views; they only speak for themselves. Regardless of their intentions, it is fair to say that some of their rhetoric, such as the years of allegations about so-called ‘sonic attacks’ against U.S. personnel in Havana, has the effect of delaying a return to the normalization process between the United States and Cuba initiated by presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro.”
Postscript with certain obviousness
Moles who have worked for the U.S. or UK from their position in “enemy” Intelligence are typically characterized as “disappointed in communism” people, who have suffered a kind of anagnorisis when discovering one day that the truth and justice are on the side of the West.
This is how they paint Oleg Penkovsky, who identified and put hundreds of agents who supplied intelligence to the USSR in mortal danger; and a senior KGB officer, a double agent in the service of British intelligence, named Oleg Gordievski. The Mi6 helped him escape from the USSR, where he was in custody, in the style of the literary characters of Ian Fleming and John Le Carré. They are heroes, deserving of high decorations.
My second comment is that, except when using public or accessible sources, without violating what is established, intelligence is based on information from inside. Its value is directly proportional to the degree of penetration in the guardian apparatuses of the largest and most compartmentalized secrets, typically those of security. In all cases, the moles are obviously breaking the law, breaking their oaths of allegiance, exposing agents operating in the other camp to mortal danger, and putting themselves in mortal danger. That’s right, since the days of the medical wars and Sun Tzu.
The difference between them does not lie there, but on the level of motivations. Why do they do it? By loyalty to a superior commitment linked to political or moral convictions, to freely chosen principles, to deep loyalties? For money or other personal convenience? Out of fear, subjected to blackmail or psychologically trapped in a personal, family, sentimental situation?
Unlike soldiers deployed on a battlefield, these others operate in a virtual field, but behind enemy lines. They are serving a cause, with which they identify for one of the stated reasons. It is what gives them meaning.
Whether to side with the United States or Cuba in the conflict may be a simple personal preference. But analyzing the conflict regardless of the asymmetry that marks it is like closing your eyes.
Cuba has fewer options, so to speak, to find out the threats and intentions of its great neighbor. It does not have U2 or SR71 planes that can collect intelligence at the limits of its airspace, much less satellites with the capacity to portray the slightest and hidden movements of the other’s forces. The only thing it can count on, and has counted on since 1959, is the penetration of its agents.
Although we do not know to what extent the information delivered to Cuba by Ana Belén Montes exposed the U.S. defense, the certain fact, as Fulton Armstrong recalls, is that the 15 agencies of the intelligence community had evaluated, since 1998, that Cuba was not a threat to the United States.
There is no reciprocal perception on the Cuban side. Although the short period of normalization softened the tone of relations, the climate deteriorated in less than six months after Obama left the White House, to the point of returning to the threatening rhetoric of the Cold War.
Given the risks, priorities and precautions of an activity like this, it would not be logical for Ana Belén to provide intelligence on media and contingency plans unrelated to Cuban national security. In any case, the potential damage to U.S. security would have been much greater if, instead of giving it to Cuba, in brief summary reports of documents and meetings, memorized by her, she had leaked thousands of pages and videos with secret or compromising information to the media or Wikileaks, as Ellsberg, Manning and Snowden did.
Where is the difference between her case and these others, praised and awarded by prestigious media and institutions? The short answer is that it is about Cuba, which is not “a foreign power” like Russia and China, but rather “of the same race,” rather “evil.”
To give a long answer, we would have to answer other questions. For example, if Ana Belén had given information to the Mossad of Israel, the Naichó of Japan, or the CNI of Mexico, would the DIA bureaucracy have demanded the death penalty or life imprisonment against her, as they wanted during the process? Would she have finally received a sentence of 25 years in prison, incommunicado in a high security prison, where she could not watch TV, read newspapers, talk to other prisoners, or receive visitors? Isn’t it a matter of revenge against Cuba and its intelligence, on the part of those who are resentful for having failed to detect it so many times? Of those who continue to paint the island as a threat to U.S. national security, which should remain on the list of terrorist countries?
Naturally, they are just questions.
Author
OnCuba Staff
