How Did Ana Monte Study In Prison

Ana Montes is in prison for a little over a decade now. Once a highly decorated U.S. intelligence analyst, Montes today lives in a two-bunk cell in the highest-security women’s prison in the nation. Montes spied for seventeen years, patiently, methodically. She passed along so many secrets about her colleagues and the advanced methods and eavesdropping platforms that American agents had covertly installed in Cuba. Montes’s motivation for spying was pure ideology she disagreed with U.S. foreign policy. After her arrest, she stated that what she did was morally right. Montes accepted no money for passing classified information, except for reimbursements for some expenses. Ana Montes successfully committed treason and espionage going undetected
for many years. The purpose of this paper is to explain how Montes was able to go elude investigators and steal secrets.

Background
Ana Belen Montes was born on February 28, 1957 in West Germany on a U.S.
Army base. Ana Montes is the eldest child of Emilia and Alberto Montes. Puerto Rico-born Alberto was a respected Army doctor, and the family moved frequently, from Germany to Kansas to Iowa. They settled in Towson, outside Baltimore, where Alberto developed a successful private psychiatric practice and Emilia became a leader in the local Puerto Rican community. Ana thrived in Maryland. Slender, bookish and witty, she graduated with a 3.9 GPA from Loch Raven High School; even with that success, she masked a growing emotional distance, grandiose feelings of superiority and a troubling family secret. To outsiders, Alberto was a caring and well-educated father of four. However, behind closed doors, he was short-tempered and bullied his children. Alberto “happened to believe that he had the right to beat his kids,” Ana would later tell CIA psychologists. “He was the king of the castle and demanded complete and total obedience.” The beatings started at five. Her dad had a violent temper they will get it with the belt whenever he got
angry.
Ana’s mother feared taking on her flammable husband, but as the verbal and physical abuse persisted, she divorced him and gained custody of their children. Ana’s parents separated when she was 15, but the damage was already there. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) wrote in a report; Montes’s childhood made her intolerant of power differentials, led her to identify with the less powerful, and solidified her desire to retaliate against authoritarian figures. In addition, the abuse she suffered at the hands of a temperamental man she associated with the U.S. military increased her vulnerability to recruitment by a foreign intelligence service. In 1979, she earned a degree in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia and then she took a liberal year where she went to Spain to study for a year and it was there where she met Ana Colon. Colon did not have any political influence over her but became her confident and later will give statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). While in Spain, she met a student who was from Argentina and a leftist, and helped open Montes’s eyes to the U.S. government’s support of authoritarian regimes (Patterson, 2016). Spain had become a hotbed of political radicalism, and the frequent anti-American protests offered a welcome diversion from schoolwork. She came back to the U.S and in 1985; she applied for a clerical job in U.S Department of Justice (DOJ) to continue her studies. While finishing a master's degree at Johns Hopkins University, she would find herself protesting against Ronald Reagan foreign policies and support to “los contras” who were fighting the “Sandinistas” in Central America. Someone noticed this and introduced her to Cuban Intelligence Agents. Montes agreed to begin spying, she knew she needed a job inside the intelligence community to do that, so she applied at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), a key producer of intelligence for the Pentagon and on that year, she joined the agency.
Indicators
Montes spoke openly against the US Government’s policies towards Central America and President Ronald Reagan's support for rebels fighting pro-communist regimes in those countries.
According to the declassified DoD (Department of Defense) IG (Inspector General) report, In March 1985 she made a clandestine trip to Cuba, via Madrid and Prague when she agreed to provide the Cubans with a short autobiography. When she returned from the trip, she ran into her friend Ana Colon and discussed the secret trip with her, after Montes settled in the DIA she discontinued contact with Colon who later found out through the FBI that the secret trip was in fact for her training as a spy. In 1996, Montes broke protocol during an ongoing international incident, when the Cuban Military brought down a plane, which involved Brothers to the Rescue organization and the subsequent death of four Americans while flying in international waters. The pentagon called Montes in to receive her expertise in the area and suddenly she felt sick and had to leave between eight and ten P.M. When Montes left the pentagon without dismissal, it raised
suspicions.
Montes traveled to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba at a specific date and time. When one of the agents at the DIA suspected her, he looked up a list of DIA employees who visited the base and Montes’s name popped up, after the discovery the DIA teamed up with the FBI to unmasked the mole.