Poor Assessment on a Good Analyst

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1 My oldest daughter, also an Army brat, was born in the same military hospital as Ana in Nurnberg, Germany.

2 Montes had visited the base weeks before the attack and is believed to have provided the Cubans intelligence on the Salvadoran unit disposition of forces and base security measures, although she never admitted this. She also disclosed the name of a covert U.S. intelligence officer working in Cuba.

3 She completed her undergraduate degree in Foreign Affairs in 1979, the year I arrived at University of Virginia for my master’s degree program in the same department. Because there were few Latin Americanists at that time, we would have had the same faculty members. The department was quite conservative then. The more radical Latin Americanists were in the History Department.

4 Aldrich Ames at the CIA in 1994 and Robert Hanssen at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 2001 were both convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and later Russia. Ames is reported to have been paid $2.5 million for his espionage. Hanssen was paid $600,000, but ego, rather than money, appeared to be his main motivation—that he was smarter than everyone else. The only known payment that Montes received from the Cubans was to pay off her graduate school debt and to buy a laptop and radio equipment used in her communication.

5 For example, the John Walker spy case included his son, brother, and a close Navy friend, Jerry Whitworth, who was actually a student of mine when I taught Latin American history in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, in the 1990s. My students want to know what grade I gave him. I say, “An A because he earned it, like you need to do!”

6 Another senior intelligence officer for the DIA, Robert Montaperto, was the lead analyst for China responsible for producing DIA’s intelligence assessments of China in the early 2000s. He was later convicted of spying for China, also for ideological reasons. Ironically, I also knew Bob, because I was involved in our department hiring him to teach classes on China at East Carolina University—before he was convicted, not after!

7 A search of the National Security Archives and CIA Archives could not locate a redacted version of this document. There is a declassified 2005 Department of Defense study on Ana Montes, titled Review of the Actions Taken to Deter, Detect and Investigate the Espionage Activities of Ana Belen Montes (U). https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/15951-document-37-office-inspector-general

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Richard J. Kilroy

Richard J. Kilroy, Jr., is Professor of Political Science at Coastal Carolina University. He is also a nonresident scholar in the Baker Institute for Public Policy’s Center for the United States and Mexico at Rice University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He spent 23 years on active duty as an Army intelligence and Latin America foreign area officer. The author can be reached at [email protected].