True Believer: Inside the Investigation and
Capture of Ana Montes, Cuba’s Master Spy
By Scott W. Carmichael
(Naval Institute Press, 179 pages, $27.95)
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and an insufficient
sense of urgency about Cuban espionage among his U.S. intelligence
colleagues, drove Scott Carmichael to take the unusual step of
writing a book about his work as a mole hunter.
The author of True Believer is also a longtime (20 years)
counterintelligence investigator for the U.S. Defense Intelligence
Agency, the Defense Department’s counterpart to the CIA. Carmichael
was the driving force behind catching Montes, a DIA analyst, who
had spent her 16-year career sending top-secret information to
Cuba.
The successful investigation and capture of one of U.S.
intelligence’s prized employees was pushed deep inside the pages of
newspapers — if it appeared at all — due to 9/11. The lapse in
intelligence that led to those attacks overshadowed a rare instance
when a mole was successfully outed.
Montes, who was arrested ten days after 9/11, was an unlikely
suspect. She had no previous connection to Cuba. A child of Puerto
Ricans, she was born the daughter to a career U.S. Army officer on
a base in Germany. Her teen years were spent in Baltimore area
public schools, and she graduated with a degree in foreign affairs
(with a Latin America emphasis) from the University of Virginia.
While rising quickly through the Justice Department as a paralegal
she earned a master’s degree from the School of Advanced
International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. “She was a model
of self-discipline, drive and focus,” Carmichael writes, adding
that she received glowing employment reviews everywhere she
worked.
Those qualities carried her ultimately to her position as the
DIA’s top political and military analyst on Cuba. Candidates for
jobs in the intelligence community undergo extensive background
reviews, but Montes had already earned a high-level security
clearance in her Justice Department position. Such credentials “can
be used like currency,” Carmichael says, providing near-instant
access to sensitive information for those new in their jobs.
Unfortunately it was during her time at Johns Hopkins that the
Cuban Intelligence Service had already recruited Montes.
Even though it was the Castro regime that approached Montes,
Carmichael writes that her motives stemmed from ideological
concerns more than anything:
Like many other Americans, as she told me openly in our
interview, she believed the U.S. approach to Cuba was
counterproductive and oppressive. Ana was also a Puerto Rican and
was raised in a family that advocated achieving the political
independence of Puerto Rico from the United States by peaceful
means. The political independence of Puerto Rico is an emotional
issue for many Puerto Ricans. Fidel Castro has often tried to play
upon the sentiments of those who favor political independence by
championing the cause of Puerto Rican independence against the
oppressive Yankee colonizer of the north, presented as a mutual
foe.
Ana Montes clearly viewed herself as a lonely heroine, willing
to risk her freedom and her family’s good name to serve the
righteous cause of lifting oppression from the masses in secret
league with her king, Fidel Castro.
True Believer shows that catching spies within our own
intelligence structure is a painstaking process. Carmichael, as
much as he is able (given that agencies like DIA just can’t let
certain information out), walks readers through each step of
evidence gathering and case development, while illustrating the
challenges in convincing his higher-ups that Montes was a problem.
What begins as a co-worker’s hunch and Carmichael’s quick
understanding is followed by several instances of extremely slow
realization by upper-level DIA officials and the FBI. Montes’s
clean record and stellar performance reviews fed others’ skepticism
about the possibility that she was a spy.
Carmichael’s passion for his full-time work is exhibited
throughout the book, as is his pride in cracking the case. At
certain points he seems to share frustration with the reader in
that there is only so much he can divulge. But he tells enough to
show why Montes is
now serving a 25-year sentence in federal prison as the result
of a plea agreement.
Carmichael makes a persuasive, if not slam-dunk, case that
Montes’s betrayal contributed to the death of Sgt. First Class
Gregory Fronius, whose family receives all profits from the book.
Sgt. Fronius was a Green Beret who in 1987 provided special
infantry training for the El Salvadoran armed forces. At the same
time Montes was DIA’s El Salvador and Nicaragua analyst, “an expert
on the military capabilities of both countries, with detailed and
extensive knowledge of their militaries,” Carmichael writes. Sgt.
Fronius was killed in a surprise early-morning attack on a heavily
protected Salvadoran military compound by rebel FMLN forces.
Carmichael explains why Montes, who made a five-week visit to El
Salvador just weeks before Fronius’s death “to acquire some sense
of the ‘ground truth’ in the country,” could have provided crucial
information to the communist revolutionaries via Cuba.
Even more convincing are Carmichael’s arguments about why it is
important that the U.S. be on alert against Cuban espionage — a
seriousness that he says many of his colleagues don’t share. He
cites several cases in which Montes could have, or was likely to,
have an influence on the lives (or deaths) of Americans and their
allies. It’s not hard to argue that in our current time, in which
most Americans are on heightened alert over our border security,
that they should be equally concerned about spies accessing our
national secrets.
“It’s a good thing we stopped [Montes] in time,” Carmichael
writes. “Cuba is not our friend. Fidel Castro opposes the United
States’ current counterterrorism initiative. He’s aligned with some
states that may support, sponsor, or harbor terrorists, or have
done so in the recent past. In the months preceding the September
11 attacks, Castro toured Syria, Libya, and Iran. While in Iran, he
crystallized his goals regarding the United States when he said,
‘Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America
to its knees.’”
Carmichael adds that when Montes was arrested, she was on the
verge of accessing many details of the U.S.’s war plans in
Afghanistan. She may not have been captured at the best time for
publicity purposes, but it was a crucial time nonetheless.
