American Ana Belén Montes, arrested in 2001 and sentenced the following year to 25 years in prison for spying for the Cuban government, was released from prison on Friday.
Now 65, this military intelligence analyst has left federal prison in Forth Worth, Texas, and is on parole for five years.
Arrested on September 21, 2001 by the federal police, she admitted having spied for almost a decade on behalf of Cuba, from 1992 to 2001, although the FBI suspects that she began spying as early as 1985. She was accused for having transmitted to Havana the names of American agents working in Cuba and the details of American naval maneuvers.
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Intelligence agents tell their job
Ana Montes was one of the “most dangerous spies” arrested by the United States: she would have revealed almost entirely the American intelligence operations on the island, specifies the BBC.
In 2012, Michelle Van Cleave, who served as head of counterintelligence under President George W. Bush, told Congress that Montes had "compromised everything – virtually everything – that we knew about Cuba and how we let's do it there."
Unlike other high-level spies apprehended during the Cold War, Ana Montes, born to a Puerto Rican father, acted out of ideology, not greed.
His work for Cuban intelligence was partly motivated by his opposition to the activities of the Reagan administration in Latin America.
According to a Defense Department inspector general report, she was angered by US support for the Nicaraguan Contras, a right-wing rebel group suspected of committing war crimes and other atrocities in the country.
"Helping Nicaragua"
Ana Belén Montes was working in the Ministry of Justice when she came to the attention of Cuban agents by expressing her displeasure.
First approached by a classmate from Johns Hopkins University in 1984, the American was then introduced to a Cuban intelligence agent, reports the British media.
During a dinner in New York, she "agreed without hesitation to work with the Cubans to 'help' Nicaragua," the inspector general's report said.
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Then she obtained a position as an intelligence expert within the Military Intelligence Agency.
For nearly two decades, she regularly met Cuban managers at restaurants in Washington DC.
To transmit her top-secret information, she sent coded messages through a program provided by Cuba.
She received her orders through shortwave transmitting devices and also used a public telephone, located next to the Washington Zoo.
Reported by a colleague
As early as 1996, a colleague denounced her.
But the American authorities did not open an investigation against him until four years later.
She was arrested in September 2001. Now free, Ana Montes will remain under surveillance for five years.
He will be prohibited from working for the government or contacting foreign agents without permission.
But Pete Lapp, one of the FBI agents who arrested her, judges that contact with Cuban agents is unlikely.
"That part of his life is over," he told CBS News.
She did what she did for them.
I can't imagine him risking his freedom.
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