The US Bureau of Prisons on Friday announced that Ana Belen Montes, one of the highest-ranking US officials, who worked as a Cuban spy has been released after two decades. The 65-year-old was found guilty in 2022 for using her position as a Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) official to leak information and pleaded guilty to committing espionage. She was sentenced to 25 years, Reuters reported.
Montes began working in DIA in 1985 and later became one of the agency’s top Cuba analysts.
According to the prosecutors, Montes received several messages from Havans over a short-radio wave, which she would then type on her laptop and decode. She was also accused of supplying information about four U.S. spies to Cuba, besides other classified information.
After this, she was arrested in September 2001. During her sentencing a year later, Montes argued that she had always obeyed conscience and that US policies to Cuba were cruel and unfair. She said, “I felt morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it.”
The US sentencing judge, Ricardo Urbina said that she put US citizens and the nation as a whole at risk.
After the release, Urbina ordered that Montes should be placed under supervision for five years, with a ban from working for governments or contacting foreign agents without permission. She also said that her internet access to be monitored.
(With inputs from agencies)
