14ymedio, Havana, 30 November 2023 — The days before her arrest, on September 21, 2001, the spy Ana Belén Montes lived immersed in stress that she tried to mitigate with meditation and sports. She had asked her contacts in Havana for “a boyfriend,” because she was thinking of leaving counterintelligence and rebuilding her life. It wasn’t to be: after 17 years serving Fidel Castro, Montes was arrested by the FBI.
The man who put the handcuffs on her after months of investigation, Pete Lapp, tells Montes’ story in great detail in his book Queen of Cuba, which will be presented this Friday, at seven p.m., at the Books and Books bookstore in Miami. Lapp – who gave a detailed interview to 14ymedio when the spy was released last January, after 20 years of imprisonment – believes that Montes’ work for Havana can be summed up in a symbol: her shortwave radio.
The device, a Sony brand which was confiscated by the FBI after the arrest, accompanied Lapp during his conversation with journalists Juan Manuel Cao and Miguel Cossío, on América TeVé. With that radio, Montes wrote down the coded messages that Havana transmitted on the Radio Habana Cuba station and received instructions from her Cuban bosses.
The agent, who today works as the head of the Threat Analysis Center of the US Department of Defense, defines Montes as a very intelligent woman and an exceptional spy. From 1950 to 2021, Lapp explains, 148 spies of different nationalities were identified in the United States. Of them, only 12 were women, seven of them of Hispanic origin and all linked to high positions in government institutions.
Only Montes was single and held a prominent position as Washington’s chief analyst o