Ana Belen Montes Frustro Intercambio de Información Sobre Cuba Entre el Pentágono y Espana 1

diciembre 28, 2022

Ricardo Quintana, Marti

Ana Belén Montes, presa en Estados Unidos por espiar para el régimen cubano.

Durante casi una década, Ana Belén Montes, analista de la Agencia de Inteligencia de Defensa de Estados Unidos (DIA) y reclutada en 1984 por los servicios cubanos de espionaje, suministró a La Habana información clave sobre un intercambio de larga data entre la DIA y su par española, entonces conocida como el Centro Superior de Información de la Defensa (CESID).

Es solo una de las revelaciones que contiene el libro, “Castro’s Nemesis: True Stories of a Master Spy-Catcher,” de Chris Simmons, el interrogador principal de Montes, quien se refiere al particular en un comunicado de prensa.

Recuerda el oficial del Ejército jubilado haber propuesto a la contrainteligencia española la oportunidad sin precedentes de interrogar a Montes sobre el tema, pero los europeos la rechazaron después de que Simmons sugirió que el intercambio sería una pérdida total.

“Prácticamente toda la información que Madrid compartió con Estados Unidos respecto a Cuba llegó a La Habana”, escribió Simmons, un experto en espiar a espías que inició su carrera militar como paracaidista.

Montes, arrestada en 2001 y condenada a 25 años de privación de libertad en 2002, podría atribuir a su excepcional memoria haber destruido la relación entre la CESID y la DIA.

“Al verse a sí misma como una heroína de la Revolución Cubana, dedicaba una o dos horas diarias a confeccionar un resumen de los secretos más importantes de las entonces 16 agencias de espionaje de Estados Unidos. Como verdadera creyente, Montes repitió esta práctica todos los días a lo largo de dieciséis años de trabajo como espía”, escribió Simmons.

Dada “su arrogancia” y “el desdén” de Cuba hacia los servicios de inteligencia de EEUU, Simmons no descarta que Montes probablemente se reuniera con los oficiales de la inteligencia cubana que la atendían en Madrid mientras asistía a estos intercambios.

Al repasar la historia del exilio cubano, Simmons destaca el hecho de que tras la llegada al poder de Fidel Castro en 1959, más de 120.000 cubanos huyeron a España, lo que ubica a ese país como el segundo después de Estados Unidos con el mayor número de exiliados de la isla.

“La presencia de esta importante comunidad de exiliados, junto con los estrechos lazos económicos, políticos y culturales que unen a las dos naciones, llevó a España a convertirse en sede de uno de los tres centros de operaciones más grandes e importantes de la inteligencia cubana en el mundo, junto a con EEUU y México”, escribió

Simmons es de la opinión de que la Dirección de Inteligencia de Cuba está entre las diez mejores del mundo y sus bases de operaciones conocidas como “Centros” generalmente se ocultan en las sedes diplomáticas.

Desde 1959, argumenta Simmons, los servicios de inteligencia de Cuba se han centrado en dos objetivos. El pueblo cubano, a nivel nacional y extraterritorial, sigue siendo su principal diana ya que La Habana ve a su población como la mayor amenaza para la supervivencia del régimen.

“El otro gran objetivo sigue siendo Estados Unidos. Sin embargo, su enfoque es puramente económico, ya que ahora se cree que la venta o el trueque de secretos estadounidenses constituye una de las mayores fuentes de ingresos que sustentan al gobierno cubano,” dijo.

En cuanto a Montes, recuerda el exmilitar que saldrá en libertad próximo 8 de enero.

Spy Who Helped Cuba Fight Miami Exiles To Be Freed. Once She’s Out, Banish Here There 4

BY THE MIAMI HERALD EDITORIAL BOARD

A demonstrator at FIU denouncing the upcoming release of Cuban spy Ana Belen Montes. LUISA YANEZ

Cuba’s top spy in the United States will be freed from prison on Jan. 8 after serving just 20 years in a federal prison in Texas. She is said to be coming to Miami, briefly. If she comes, she should keep on moving for the repressive regime for which she betrayed us. She rightly will be persona non grata.

Ana Belen Montes, now 65, was required to serve most of the 25 years to which a Washington judge sentenced her for passing U.S. government secrets to Cuba.

Throughout the 1990s, Montes was a top intelligence analyst and Cuba expert for the Defense Intelligence Agency and then the State Department. At the same time, she spied for the Cuban government, passing secrets to them, which she memorized during the day in her cubicle and transcribed at home at night for her Cuban handlers, with whom she communicated through coded messages over shortwave radio.

Finally, double-crossed by another captured Cuban spy after 17 years of betraying her government, Montes was arrested and charged with espionage. She agreed to collaborate with the U.S. government to avoid treason charges and a possible death penalty. It’s unclear if she ever turned on her Cuban handlers.

It was a relatively lenient sentence for this Mata Hari, whose family had roots in Puerto Rico. Other traitors like Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen are serving life sentences and may never be released. In 1953, in one of America’s most famous spy cases, the Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel, were executed for conspiracy to commit espionage.

Even on the eve of her release, the Miami Herald on Thursday revealed new allegations about Montes’ spycraft, which had not been released until now. It turns out, she was willing to divulge U.S. war plans in Afghanistan. Some believe that innocents lost their lives because of Montes’ deceit. Prosecutors at her trial said she passed on the names of four Cuban spies; she also played a role in the deaths of four Brothers to the Rescue fliers in the 1996 shootdown of two Cessna aircraft by Cuban MiGs. The fliers from Miami allegedly crossed into Cuban airspace.

Feature continues here: Send Montes to Cuba

Editor’s note: This OPED is filled with typos and factual errors, such as:

• “…Montes’ (sic) was the State Department’s point person in determining the U.S. response to the fliers’ deaths.” FALSE – Montes was employed by the Defense Intelligence Agency, not the State Department.
• “Finally, double-crossed by another captured Cuban spy…”
• “It’s unclear if she ever turned on her Cuban handlers.”  FALSE – My book, CASTRO’S NEMESIS notes “She “outed” her handlers…” (p. 258). Furthermore, a recent Miami Herald article on retired FBI Agent Pete Lapp’s forthcoming book also reported she had identified her handlers.
• “…the Miami Herald on Thursday revealed new allegations about Montes’ spycraft, which had not been released until now. It turns out, she was willing to divulge U.S. war plans in Afghanistan.” FALSE – This news was widely reported 20 years ago immediately following her arrest.

Nonetheless, we appreciate the paper’s suggestion she should go to Cuba, but I suspect they wouldn’t even want her. For if history has taught us anything, it is that heroes of the Cuban Revolution are quite disposable.

 

 

 

 

 

Cuba’s Top Spy Ana Belen Montes Gets Ready To Walk Out Of Federal Prison 4

BY HANK TESTER, CBS4 Miami

MIAMI – After 20 years, Cuba’s top spy will walk out of a Texas federal lockup. 

Author and former spy catcher for the Defense Intelligence Agency Chris Simmons does not mince words, “I wish we could have kept her in there longer.”

In the 1990s Ana Belen Montes was the Defense Intelligence Agency’s top Cuban analyst. 

At the same time, she was undermining U.S. Operations in Central America, distorting the U.S. Government’s views on Cuba, burning about 450 U.S. operatives, and leaking U.S.  military information, which accusers say led to the death in El Salvador of Green Beret Sergeant Gregory A. Fronius. 

On February 24, 1996, over the straits of Florida in international air space, Cuba shot down two U.S. registered humanitarian aircraft operated by Cuban exile organization Brothers to the Rescue.

Four pilots and volunteers died. 

Eventually, in 1998, the FBI rolls up and the feds try members of a huge Cuba spy ring based in South Florida.

Members of the group were accused of aiding Cuba in the shootdown. 

According to Simmons, “The Wasp Network was the largest foreign spy network to operate in the United States and Montes was one of Havana’s top ten assets.”

In his book, “Castro’s Nemesis,” Chris Simmons knits together the Ana Belen Montes story with the Cuban Wasp Spy network. 

Simmons was on the team that rooted out Montes and is quick to say, “I have never seen someone so heartless in all my life.”

In the aftermath of the Brothers to the Rescue shootdown, Montes was on the team that was evaluating a U.S. response and at the same time was reporting that information to her Cuban handlers. 

The Cubans knew every move the U.S. was contemplating. 

“Just the idea she was leaving the Pentagon and immediately going to a surveillance detection route and meeting with her handlers and presenting what at the time was the Pentagon’s preferred response was a cruise missile attack on Cuba,” Simmons told CBS4 News.

Montes was arrested and escorted out of DIA headquarters just ahead of the Iraq War because she was involved with Cuba’s stealing of American Secrets and selling them to unfriendly foreign actors. 

In the process of the Montes’ investigation, Simmons says the team realized there was a second spy operating within the agency. 

Feature continues here: America’s Deadliest Spy

Cuba Ransomware Infections Of U.S. Organizations Have Doubled In Last Year, Feds Say 1

Derek B. Johnson, SC Magazine

A screenshot of the dark web page for the Cuba Ransomware group, which is [allegedly] not known to be affiliated with the country or government of Cuba. (Image source: Cuba Ransomware site accessed through Tor browser) [Editor’s addition]

The Cuba ransomware group has doubled its number of American victims over the past year, infecting at least 65 U.S. entities across a broad range of critical infrastructure sectors and stealing more than $60 million in ransom payment through August 2022, according to a new joint advisory by the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

That’s an increase from the 49 U.S. victims and $43 million in ransom payments detailed in a December 2021 FBI flash alert. Many of the organizations targeted by the group are designated as critical infrastructure, with the agencies flagging the financial services, government, healthcare, manufacturing and information technology sectors as top targets.

Cuba ransomware has also compromised at least an additional 36 entities outside of the U.S. over that same period.

Ransomware group using new TTPs to deploy malware

To do this, the group has mostly been “living off the land” to carry out attacks, relying on a mix of known vulnerabilities, phishing campaigns, commercial remote desktop tools and stolen credentials to gain access to victim systems and deploy malware.

However, citing research from Palo Alto Networks, the agencies said that since May 2022, the group has been observed deploying a number of new tactics, techniques and procedures. According to Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 security research team, those changes include the use of the ROMCOM RAT malware family, the ZeroLogon vulnerability, local privilege escalation exploits and a kernel driver that specifically targets security products.

“This year, Cuba ransomware actors have added to their TTPs, and third-party and open-source reports have identified a possible link between Cuba ransomware actors, RomCom Remote Access Trojan actors, and Industrial Spy ransomware actors,” the advisory reads.

Despite the name, there is no evidence linking the Cuba ransomware group to the country of Cuba or the Cuban government. The document includes fresh indicators of compromise gleaned from FBI threat response engagements related to the group through August, as well as a sample ransom note sent to victims in broken English.

“Greetings! Unfortunately we have to report that your company were compromised. All your files were encrypted and you can’t restore them without our private key,” one sample note reads. “Trying to restore it without our help may cause complete loss of your data. Also we researched whole your corporate network and downloaded all your sensitive data to our servers. If we will not get any contact from you in the next 3 days we will public it in our news site.”

Feature continues here: Cuban Ramsonware

Editor’s Note: I respectfully disagree with the claim there is “no evidence linking the Cuba ransomware to the country of Cuba or the Cuban government.” The Havana regime has a sixty-year history of involvement in a wide range of criminal operations against the United States, to include terrorism, economic espionage, intelligence trafficking, drug trafficking, Medicare fraud, etc. In a surveillance state like Cuba, a ransomware group cannot operate without government complicity. I encourage Mr. Johnson and other journalists to dig deeper – you will find the proof you seek.

FBI Alerted Notorious Spy For Russia To Another Working For Cuba 1

As agents were closing in on Ana Montes, one reported the espionage investigation to Robert Hanssen

By Shane Harris, Washington Post

November 30, 2022 at 5:58 p.m. EST

DIA analyst Ana Belen Montes, 44, was arrested on Sept. 21, 2001 and charged with conspiracy to deliver U.S. national defense information to Cuba. (Courtesy FBI)

In late 2000, the FBI was closing in on a suspected spy for Cuba working inside the Defense Intelligence Agency. Undercover operatives would soon begin trailing Ana Montes, the agency’s top military and political analyst on Cuba, by car and on foot. They filmed her making calls on pay phones, even though she carried a cellphone in her purse. They intercepted Montes’s mail and inspected the trash outside her apartment in Washington.

Montes had been spying nearly 17 years for Cuba, passing along so much classified information about DIA personnel, as well as on eavesdropping technology covertly installed on the island, that she essentially compromised every method the United States used to surveil the Castro regime, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials. That makes Montes one of the most damaging spies of her time, they said.

Opening an investigation against a decorated intelligence officer, who colleagues heralded as the “Queen of Cuba,” was painstaking and high-stakes. And almost as soon it began, the FBI nearly shot itself in the foot.

The slip-up was inadvertent. Whenever the bureau began an intelligence investigation that might ruffle feathers in a foreign government or upset U.S. foreign policy, officials typically informed the State Department’s Office of Foreign Missions (OFM). It was a sleepy outfit, responsible for keeping tabs on travel by foreign diplomats and overseeing such things as plans to build new embassies or consulates in the United States. Hardly the setting for an espionage thriller.

So Terry Holstad, then the chief of the Cuba unit at FBI headquarters, never thought twice when he described the secretive Montes investigation to the bureau’s liaison to the OFM, a veteran agent and longtime colleague named Robert Hanssen.

Unbeknown to Holstad and the rest of the FBI, Hanssen had started spying for Russia more than 20 years earlier. He gave thousands of pages of classified documents to the KGB, divulging secrets about U.S. nuclear war planning and weapons technology. He compromised the identities of dozens of human sources, at least three of whom were executed, according to a review by the Justice Department’s inspector general, which called Hanssen “the most damaging spy in FBI history.”

Feature continues here: FBI Mistake