Book Review | True Believer: Inside the Investigation and Capture of Ana Montes, Cuba's Master Spy

CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence
Studies in Intelligence, 2007

True Believer: Inside the Investigation and Capture of Ana Montes, Cuba's Master Spy

Scott W. Carmichael. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2007, 187 pp., photos, index.

Reviewed by Hayden B. Peake, curator of the CIA's Historical Intelligence Collection

The "Queen of Cuba" was what some of Ana Montes's fellow DIA analysts called her. Fidel Castro may have agreed. Montes was one of Cuba's best agents in America during much of her 16-year DIA career. She was arrested on 21 September 2001, sentenced on 16 October 2002, and is serving her 25 years. Author Scott Carmichael, a DIA senior counterintelligence investigator, was instrumental in bringing her to justice. He tells much of the story in this memoir, but many of the details one would like to know--just when and how she was recruited, precisely what was it that made DIA security and the FBI think she was an agent--have been omitted, probably for security reasons.

Still we learn that signs of a mole in the Latin American area of the Intelligence Community had appeared during the late 1980s. What alerted an observant DIA employee to Montes is obscured, but when Carmichael was told, he began in April 1996 what turned out to be an on-again off-again investigation--there was an incredible unexplained 4-year lapse of activity. Besides providing a narrative chronology of investigative events, True Believer tells us something about Montes's background, her relationship with her colleagues, and the level of classified intelligence to which she had access. Of particular interest is Carmichael's persistence as he sought to convince the FBI and his DIA superiors that Montes was very likely involved in espionage. And then, having done that, he describes the elaborate and clever schemes developed to keep her from suspecting she was under suspicion as her access to sensitive materials was minimized. This became difficult after she was accepted as an analyst in the National Intelligence Council at CIA headquarters, but with the help of a clever, bad-tempered admiral, her assignment was changed.

Throughout all this, perhaps most frustrating to Carmichael were the legal details that had to be observed during the investigation to protect its integrity. In the Epilogue, Carmichael releases a surprising bit of pique over what he perceives as a diminished sense of urgency within "my community about detecting and countering the effects of Cuban penetrations of the US government."(176) He encourages greater efforts to prevent another Montes and concludes with a "well done" to the Cuban service for running her so long. He also warns Havana that he won't give up. There is more to be said about the Montes case, but True Believer is a worthwhile start.