WASHINGTON, USA (AFP): The United States is likely riddled with Cuban spies who are sharing their intelligence with US foes and rivals like Iran, Russia and China, the Pentagon's top spy-catcher said Wednesday.
Scott Carmichael, the burly head of counter-intelligence at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), was the lead investigator who exposed former DIA analyst Ana Montes as a long-serving Cuban agent in 2001.
"The ease with which they recruited Ana Montes leads me to strongly believe there are others," Carmichael, who has published a book about the Montes case called "True Believer," said at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
The spy-hunter said he had written the book "because I wanted to heighten public awareness of the threat that continues to be posed to our national security by the Cuban intelligence operations."
He said that Cuba "shares her information ... with countries like Iran, China, Russia, other countries who have interests maybe inimical to those of the United States."
Montes is serving a 25-year jail term in Texas after being convicted of spying for Cuba over two decades. She could have faced the death penalty but reached a plea deal by agreeing to cooperate with federal investigators.
After joining the DIA, the military equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in 1985, Montes rose to become the US intelligence community's "queen of Cuba" with an influential role in shaping government policy.
But Carmichael said she had already been recruited by Cuban intelligence in 1984.
She "never took a dime" from her secret bosses in Havana and was a "model employee" who for years operated with a low profile, convinced that US policy on Fidel Castro's regime was "dead wrong."
Montes has received "scant attention" in the US media "and yet she was one of the most devastating spies of the modern era," Carmichael said.
"She came to us with the full intention of spying against us, and she spied against for us for 16 years until the date of her arrest on 21 September, 2001."
The arrest came in the chaotic aftermath of the September 11 carnage, when anthrax postal attacks were on the loose in US cities and plans to invade Taliban-ruled Afghanistan were already taking shape.
No media commentators have put Montes in the same league as infamous spies like Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who spied for Russia, or Aldrich Ames, a CIA counter-intelligence officer who was also on Moscow's payroll.
"And yet the damage caused by Ana Montes was exceptionally grave and equal to the damage committed by all of those that I've named," Carmichael said.
"We have to be concerned about the possibility that there are additional Ana Monteses among us," he added.
"The danger is that the information could be shared with Iran or wherever our fighting forces are today."
Roger Noriega, a former top State Department official overseeing Latin America policy, told the AEI event that Cuba was "unique in one very extraordinarily important sense" among nations spying on the United States.
He cited the Lourdes intelligence facility, a Cuban-Russian site less than 100 miles from Key West in Florida, "which gave it a tremendous amount of access to material from the United States."
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