By Nora Gamez Torres, Miami Herald
In the course of the investigation that led to the shocking 2001 arrest of Ana Belén Montes, the Pentagon’s top Cuban military analyst who was caught spying for Havana, the Defense Intelligence Agency opened a second inquiry on the suspicion that another Cuban mole was embedded in the U.S. intelligence community.
More than 20 years later, the previously unknown investigation, code-named Wrong Spirit, is revealed in a new book written by Chris Simmons, a retired lieutenant colonel with the U.S. Army and former career counterintelligence officer. Simmons was a central figure in identifying Montes as the Havana spy that the FBI had been trying to find for three years.
According to Simmons’ book, “Castro’s Nemesis: True Stories of a Master Spy-Catcher,” the second suspected spy was another senior official at the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA. Charges were never brought against the man, who was allowed to retire. The book, published this week, does not name the official, whose identity remains classified.
While Montes and the alleged mole worked together at times, he “had a more rounded career because [Montes] was doing analysis the whole time, whereas he was doing human intelligence operations, and then he switched over to another field,” Simmons told the Miami Herald.
The search for the second mole started as a theory: if Havana thought the DIA was an agency worth penetrating, that “demanded the redundancy of several agents,” Simmons discussed with his counterintelligence colleagues at the time, according to the book.
While trying to pin Montes as the possible spy working for Cuba, other names caught Simmons’ team’s attention.
“Anytime you’re doing an investigation, you always do what we call a link analysis, connecting them with all their associates, friends, family, looking for a pattern,” Simmons said. “Who else could know, who might be aware of certain things? And in her case, a couple of names did come up a lot.”
One former official was cleared of any wrongdoing, Simmons said, but “the other gentleman, he fit the pattern, and there was a lot of circumstantial evidence.”
Like Montes, who was hired in 1985, Simmons said the official under investigation had a similarly long career at the agency and was active in the mid-1980s. “The WRONG SPIRIT agent, who had a large regional portfolio, was likely able to provide Cuba with transnational information of interest to numerous U.S. adversaries,” Simmons said in a press release promoting the book.
While it was previously reported that Montes passed the identities of four U.S. undercover intelligence agents and details of U.S. military exercises and plans to Cuba, she also probably caused extensive damage to U.S. efforts to gather intelligence on the Cuban government.
It is believed she compromised the CIA’s entire human intelligence collection program in Cuba because she participated in a three-day conference attended by most Cuba case officers, according to a conversation reproduced in the book between Simmons and a CIA official on a team targeting Cuban intelligence.
“She probably learned what sites they operated out of, got good descriptions of them, phone numbers and great insights into who, what, and where we’re running or targeting assets,” the official told Simmons, according to the book.
WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE SUSPECTED SPY
While “Castro’s Nemesis” is short on details of the danger posed by the possible second mole, it suggests he might have leaked to his spymasters in Havana the names of Cuban officials included in a secret DIA assessment of Cuba’s involvement in narcotrafficking in the late 1980s. That, in turn, the book speculates, might have led to high-profile arrests on the island and trials that ended with the execution of Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa, Col. Antonio de la Guardia and another two military officials, and the imprisonment of several others under Fidel Castro’s order in 1989.
Not much else is known about the Wrong Spirit suspect, who was never arrested. The mysterious case appears to be mentioned only twice in the book. At least one sentence with information about the case appears redacted because the U.S. government would not allow Simmons to print it. The book manuscript was cleared for publication by the Pentagon after an 18-month review.
“Although a massive investigative file of circumstantial evidence was assembled against Wrong Spirit, the case never went to trial,” Simmons wrote in the book. “Instead, the senior DIA official — himself a former case officer — was allowed to quietly retire.”
Montes, on the contrary, was sentenced to 25 years in prison and is set to be released next January.
If Wrong Spirit was such a damaging spy, as Simmons suspected, why would the agency let him off the hook?
The counterintelligence expert provided several explanations for what essentially was the same issue: lack of resources.
“The problem at the time was that we wrapped up Montes [investigation], her debriefing was going on, so my team is closely tied up doing the debriefing, and I had to provide people to the damage-assessment team, so we had essentially no one left to support the Wrong Spirit investigation,” he said.
The agency also shifted its focus to counterterrorism after the 9/11 attacks, he added, “to the extent that it really, in my opinion, jeopardized our national security by leaving the back door open to our enemies.”
But if Wrong Spirit was indeed a Cuban asset and was at some point aware that he was under an espionage investigation, Simmons believes that that would have put an end to his activities, and Cuban intelligence would have dropped him, meaning that there was little chance he continued spying even if he remained free.
“Even though I gotta choose my words carefully because the Pentagon so far is okay with this, I’m confident that the case was spot on,” Simmons said. “But unfortunately, a lot of cases don’t go to trial, they just end their careers, and they quietly go away, and he falls into the latter category.
“The reality is that spy-catching is all about limited resources,” he said.
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