Applaud the unsung Cuban American who helped bring Castro’s spy to justice | Guest Opinion

In just a few days, after more than two decades in prison, convicted Cuban spy Ana Belén Montes is scheduled to be freed. The American citizen will walk away from the “Admin Unit,” a Supermax prison-within-a-prison for dangerous female offenders on the grounds of the Carswell Federal Medical Center just outside Fort Worth, Texas.

Say what you will about Montes’ crimes, the former senior U.S. military analyst has done hard time. For years, Montes has bunked alongside al-Qaida terrorists, serial murderers and drug lords in the Texas fortress. “Ana had a lot of rules on her,” Squeaky Fromme, Ana’s former Admin Unit neighbor, told me in an interview for my new book on Montes.

“She had more restrictions than I did,” Fromme said.

Let that sink in. Montes, doctor’s daughter and demure U.S. government insider, lived under tighter prison restrictions than Charles Manson’s gun-toting former lover, who tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975. With her grad-school books and refined manners, Montes wouldn’t seem to be much of a threat. And yet her jailers kept her on a tight leash. Montes had morphed, seemingly overnight, from dutiful oldest child to dangerous American traitor.

As Montes completes her sentence, investigators should modestly pause to reflect: Montes burrowed deep into the U.S. intelligence community and stayed there for almost 17 years, leading America’s top counterintelligence expert to label her “one of the most damaging spies in U.S. history.” And she might never have been caught if it weren’t for an unsung hero who risked her career, and her freedom, to help identify Montes as Fidel Castro’s top U.S. spy.

In the early 1960s, 6-year-old Elena Valdez fled Havana with her parents and sister. “My dad left first because they were rounding up all the men,” said Valdez, who asked to be identified with a pseudonym to protect her identity. Like so many other families run out of Cuba after the Revolution, Valdez’s parents sought refuge in Miami, and began to rebuild.

Valdez became the first in her family to attend college and then a prestigious U.S. graduate school. She had a facility for languages and, in the early 1980s, was hired as a Spanish-speaking linguist for the National Security Agency.

Montes also started a new job in the 1980s. After graduate school in Washington, a friend took her to New York to meet a Cuban intelligence officer. Montes, of Puerto Rican heritage, then 27, “unhesitatingly agreed” to spy on behalf of Cuba. “I was in a position to help,” she later boasted. Montes traveled clandestinely to Havana to receive Spy 101 training, then got hired as an analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the U.S. military’s intelligence arm. While Montes was full of romantic notions about the Revolution, Valdez harbored a burning contempt for the Castro regime. The two women never met. Yet they were on intersecting paths, headed for a collision.

In the late 1990s, after years as a counterintelligence analyst for the NSA, Valdez and her team picked up crumbs that the Cubans had embedded an agent deep inside the United States. Valdez and her boss handed the FBI detailed clues about an unidentified subject, or UNSUB, who appeared to be a senior U.S. official on Havana’s payroll.

“I briefed them [FBI]. I briefed a whole room of people. And I thought, ‘Wow, this is going to get this going,’ ” Valdez said in 2022, in the first interview that the now-retired NSA official has ever given.

But two years later, her patience with the FBI was shot. “There should have been close cooperation, but there wasn’t,” she said. In after-action reports, the Defense Department agreed. “Interagency rivalries and personal rancor persisted through a major portion of the Montes espionage case,” it concluded.

For Valdez, the final insult was yet to come. She called the FBI for an update and said she was told, erroneously, that the Cuban case was closed. In anger, she told her herself, “We will figure this out, even if I have to do this on the side.”

And she did. In fall 2000, behind the back of the FBI, Valdez provided a briefing on the Cuban UNSUB clues to DIA investigators. “I said, somebody has to know who this is,” she said. Within days, the DIA agents identified Ana Montes as a likely Cuban spy. They prepared a briefing memo for the FBI. But instead of praising DIA, the FBI fumed over the leaks. And an FBI supervisor threatened to arrest Valdez for talking out of school. The NSA was furious with her, too.

The DIA team persisted, and the FBI opened an investigation of Montes in late 2000. When the Bureau covertly searched her D.C. apartment, it found secret messages to the Cubans on her laptop. Montes had disclosed the true names of covert U.S. intelligence officers working in Havana.

The FBI finally arrested Montes just after 9/11. NSA’s Valdez was overwhelmed. “Honestly I felt like crying.” It had taken a Cuban American, forced to flee her homeland as a girl, to help expose Castro’s prized spy.

Jim Popkin is an investigative journalist based in Washington, D.C. His book, “Code Name Blue Wren: The True Story of America’s Most Dangerous Female Spy — and the Sister She Betrayed,” was published this week.