A Spy Catcher Speaks
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported the date of Ana Montes's arrest. Montes was arrested on September 21, 2001. In addition, Montes received coded messages on shortwave radio and did not broadcast messages in that manner.
The world of spying is renowned for its secrecy, and nobody is more secretive than the spy catchers.
So it is rather unusual to see Scott Carmichael, a counterintelligence officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, step out from behind the curtain in his new book, True Believer, and offer a rare inside look at the effort to uncover one of the most damaging spies inside the U.S. intelligence community in recent years.
Ana Montes was perhaps the most respected Cuba analyst inside the U.S. intelligence community before she was arrested on Sept. 21, 2001, and charged with spying for the Cuban government for more than a decade. A model employee who had sailed through a polygraph examination in 1994, Montes was almost the exact opposite of the usual template for spies. Not only was she female, but she also lived modestly, apparently never having accepted any money in return for her efforts.
She also excelled at her job. Indeed, Carmichael notes that she was arrested only one day before she would have gained access to the nation's complete war plan for the invasion of Afghanistan, the details of which would have been of great interest to her Cuban handlers.
For Carmichael, it all started with a hunch, but Montes was so highly regarded inside the tight-knit community that it took some five years before there was enough evidence for an arrest. The biggest mystery was how she was communicating with her Cuban contacts. Investigators eventually determined that she received coded messages on a shortwave radio. She eventually pleaded guilty, and is serving a 25-year prison term.
Carmichael wrote the book as a wake-up call to the threat from Cuban intelligence–and a testament to the quality of Cuban spymasters. "There seemed to be no urgency within my community about detecting and countering the effects of Cuban penetrations of the U.S. government," he writes. "It's as though my peers viewed Ana Montes as an anomaly, an exception rather than the rule–as though the Cubans just got lucky with Ana Montes."
Although the assessments of the specific damage her spying caused remain classified, Carmichael offers a few thoughts on what she might have passed on to officials in Havana. For one thing, he suggests that she may have helped cause the death of a U.S. soldier in El Salvador 20 years ago. Army Sgt. Gregory Fronius, a U.S. Green Beret, was killed in a battle with Cuban-backed rebels who stormed a Salvadoran camp on March 31, 1987. Montes had been at the El Paraiso camp only a few weeks before the fatal attack. "The trusted DIA analyst who had just visited Greg's compound, the quietly dressed, professional woman who listened so attentively to all the briefings, was working for the other side," he writes. "I believe that Ana Montes betrayed Greg Fronius when he needed her most."
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