According to a document issued by the US Prisons Agency, the American Ana Belen Montes, who was arrested in 2001 and sentenced the following year to 25 years in prison on charges of spying for the Cuban government, will be released from prison on Sunday.
Now 65, the military intelligence analyst, who was specifically accused of relaying the names of American agents operating in Cuba and details of US naval maneuvers to Havana, will leave her prison in Carswell, Texas, and be released for five years.
Detained by the Federal Police (FBI) on September 21, 2001 at Bolling Air Force Base, south of Washington, D.C., she admitted to having spied for nearly a decade for Cuba, from 1992 to 2001, although the FBI suspects she did spying for Cuba. The spying began as early as 1985.
She was working for the Department of Justice when she came to the attention of Cuban agents by expressing her displeasure with US policy toward Central America, according to a biography posted on the FBI website.
Then Ana Belen Montes got a position as an intelligence expert at the Military Intelligence Agency (DIA).
To transmit her information, encrypted using software provided by Cuba, the woman who was born to a Puerto Rican father at a US base in Nuremberg (Germany) used shortwave transmitters and a public telephone located next to the Washington Zoo.
Ana Belen Montes was denounced in 1996 by a colleague, but US authorities did not open an investigation against her until four years later.
