Ana Belen Montes, Cuba's top spy, to be released from federal prison

Cuba’s top spy detained in the United States, Ana Belén Montes, is preparing to be released from a federal prison in Texas on January 8, 2023, according to CBS Miami.

"I wish we had left her there longer," said one of the leading Cuban agent hunters in the United States, former counterintelligence officer Chris Simmons. 

In the 1990s, Ana Belén Montes was a Cuban analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) at the Pentagon; she is accused of having sent reports to the Castro regime for 17 years, leaking U.S. military information and distorting U.S. views on Cuba.

"Montes communicated with the Cuban Intelligence Service through coded messages and received instructions via encrypted shortwave transmissions from Cuba," federal prosecutors said, according to the documents containing the charges against Montes.

In addition, DIA counterintelligence agent Scott W. Carmichael, who led the investigation into Montes, accused her in 2007 of providing information on the location of Sgt. Gregory A. Fronius, who was killed in 1987 in a Salvadoran town after an attack by the FMLN, a far-left party in El Salvador created through the mediation of Fidel Castro's regime.

During her trial, Montes was also linked to the shooting down of two aircraft belonging to the exile organization Brothers to the Rescue in February 1996 by the Cuban government. Four pilots and volunteers were killed.

In his book Castro's Nemesis, Simmons intertwines Montes' story with the Avispa Network, a group made up of five agents of the Cuban regime who were sentenced in the United States for espionage.

Montes was arrested on September 20, 2001, for involvement in the theft of U.S. secrets and received a 25-year sentence. The former spy is currently 65 years old.

Cuban-American Senator Marco Rubio said in September that Montes "was the spy who did the most damage to this country in many years. She was in charge of Cuba at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. They called her the 'Queen of Cuba'".

"Frankly, she deserved life imprisonment or the death penalty, that's what a person who commits such treason in the U.S. deserves," he added.