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."
Carmichael also suggests that she could have passed on crucial information to Cuba ahead of the 1989 invasion of Panama, as well as U.S. operations in Haiti, Colombia, and Cuba. "Ana Montes was a true believer," he writes. "She spied out of a conviction that Fidel Castro was both the savior of the Cuban people and a champion of oppressed people throughout the world."
Still, while Carmichael was engaged in the long investigation, Montes's meteoric rise continued. She had received a fellowship at the prestigious National Intelligence Council, the intelligence community's top advisory body. Due to start in January 2001, she would have been granted even broader access to the nation's top secrets, with a particular focus on Latin America.
Some of the most fascinating detail in the book comes with Carmichael's description of the length to which officials went to keep the investigation secret from Montes and her colleagues. They schemed to derail her appointment to the sensitive NIC post without alerting her supervisors. This became so difficult that Carmichael finally enlisted the help of the director of the DIA, Adm. Thomas Wilson. In a staff meeting, Wilson threw a calculated tantrum over how many DIA analysts were on loan to other agencies and promptly suspended all external assignments for DIA officers. This ploy, which held up a variety of assignments across the agency, is a dramatic illustration of just how far officials are willing to go in an effort to catch spies red-handed.
Carmichael's book was cleared by the DIA and is therefore sometimes frustratingly short on details. (Carmichael, for example, omits any description of the key tip-off that led FBI investigators to agree that Montes was most likely a spy.) But the writing is engaging and frank, providing an unprecedented glimpse into the mind-set of spy hunters–and the difficulty of building a case. One surprising fact: In the pre-9/11 world, it took more than four months after Montes was declared a suspect for the FBI to obtain warrants to eavesdrop on her communications.
Carmichael is donating any proceeds from the book to the Fronius family. But writing it has still come at some personal cost. "There are some among my peers in this business who take exception to my having published a book about my experience on the job," he writes. "Some may even avoid working with me in the future, for fear their action and words will end up in a book somewhere . . . . I understand. So be it."