Ana Montes Ana Belen Montes ( Born February 28 , 1957 ) is a former senior analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency ( DIA ) in the United States . On September 21 , 2001 , she was arrested and subsequently charged with Conspiracy to Commit Espionage for the government of Cuba . Montes eventually pleaded guilty to spying and in October 2002 , was sentenced to a 25 - year prison term followed by five years probation . Life and career . Montes was born in West Germany , where her father , Alberto Montes , was posted as an Army doctor . The family later lived in Topeka , Kansas and later Towson , Maryland , where she graduated from Loch Raven High School in 1975 . In 1979 she earned a degree in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia , and in 1988 she finished a master ' s degree at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies . Montes ' brother and sister , Lucy and Tito , became FBI officers and her former boyfriend , Roger Corneretto , was an intelligence officer specializing in Cuba for the Pentagon . It was later revealed that her father , a Puerto Rican , had conservative views , and had a strained relationship with his more radical daughter . Montes joined the DIA from the U . S . Department of Justice in September 1985 . Her first assignment was at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington where she worked as an intelligence research specialist . In 1992 , Montes was selected for the DIA ' s Exceptional Analyst Program and later traveled to Cuba to study the Cuban military . Montes advanced rapidly through the ranks at DIA and became DIA ' s most senior Cuban analyst . Her co - workers regarded her as responsible and dependable , and noted her " no - nonsense " attitude . Prosecutors would later allege that Montes was already working for the Cubans when she joined the DIA in 1985 . Espionage . In their charging documents , federal prosecutors stated : " " Montes communicated with the Cuban Intelligence Service through encrypted messages and received her instructions through shortwave encrypted transmissions from Cuba . In addition , Montes communicated by coded numeric pager messages with the Cuban Intelligence Service by public telephones located in the District of Columbia and Maryland . The codes included ' I received message ' or ' danger . ' " " The prosecutors further stated that all of the information was on water - soluble paper that could be rapidly destroyed . During the course of the investigation against her , it was determined that Montes passed a considerable amount of classified information to Cuba ' s government , including the identities of four spies . In 2007 , DIA counterintelligence official Scott W . Carmichael publicly alleged that it was Ana Montes who told Cuban intelligence officers about a clandestine U . S . Army camp in El Salvador . Carmichael alleged that Montes knew about the existence of the Special Forces camp because she visited it only a few weeks before the camp was attacked in 1987 by Cuban - supported guerrillas of the FMLN . Carmichael , who had led DIA ' s investigation of Montes , named Montes as being directly responsible for the death of Green Beret SGT Gregory A . Fronius who was killed at El Paraíso , El Salvador , on March 31 , 1987 during the FMLN attack . Carmichael characterized the damage Montes caused to the DIA and other U . S . intelligence agencies as " exceptionally grave , " and stated that she compromised a " special access program " that was kept even from him , the lead investigator on her case . In a May 6 , 2002 interview with CBS News , former Undersecretary of State John Bolton stated that an official 1998 U . S . government report with significant contributions by Montes concluded that Cuba did not represent a significant military threat to the United States or the region . Bolton alleged that it was not possible to exclude the possibility that the administration of President Bill Clinton may have overlooked Cuba as a potential threat because of Montes ' influence and the way she shaped reporting at DIA . Carmichael further alleged that many in the U . S . intelligence community believed that Montes ' penetration of the DIA was not the exception , but the rule , and that the Cuban intelligence services had numerous spies and moles within U . S . intelligence agencies . In 2004 a Federal indictment alleged that Montes had assistance from another Cuban agent , Marta Rita Velazquez , once a legal officer at the State Department ’ s Agency for International Development , who also was alleged to have recruited Montes into espionage . The Federal indictment was unsealed in April 2013 . Velazquez has been outside the US since 2002 , apparently in Sweden , which does not have an extradition treaty with the US for spy cases . Arrest . Montes was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation at her office on 20 September 2001 . Prosecutors stated that Montes had been privy to classified information about the U . S . military ' s impending invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 , and that they did not want her revealing this information to potential enemies . In 2002 , Montes pleaded guilty to the charge which could have carried the death penalty , but was sentenced to 25 years in prison in October of the same year after accepting a plea agreement with the U . S . government . According to her lawyer , Plato Cacheris , Montes committed the espionage based upon moral reasons , as " She felt the Cubans were treated unfairly by the U . S . government . " Life In Prison . Montes is currently incarcerated at FMC Carswell in Fort Worth , Texas . FMC Carswell is listed by the Federal Bureau of Prisons as a facility located in the northeast corner of the Naval Air Station , Joint Reserve Base , Fort Worth , which provides specialized medical and mental health services to female offenders . Montes is listed as FMC Register # 25037 - 016 . Her tentative release date is listed as July 1 , 2023 . There is no parole in the US federal prison system .